Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA 2023 strikes and the AI provisions of the resulting MBAs

In May 2023 the Writers Guild of America struck the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — the bargaining body for the major US studios and streamers — and in July 2023 SAG-AFTRA struck the same counter-party, producing the first joint Hollywood writers-and-actors stoppage since 1960. By the time both unions had ratified successor contracts in the autumn of 2023, generative AI had moved from an unbargained-for technology drift in the AMPTP's production pipeline into a set of named, enforceable clauses inside the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement and the SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical/Streaming Agreement. The 2023 strikes are, on the public record this corpus tracks, the field-defining instance of US creative-industry worker organising securing contractual protections against AI in employment — the first major American collective-bargaining settlement to bind generative AI by category (literary material, digital replicas, synthetic performers, training data) rather than by general principle, and the template invoked by adjacent US creative-industry organising (the Concept Art Association, the Authors Guild, the Graphic Artists Guild) and by international trade-union commentary since.

Origins: the AMPTP bargaining round of 2023

The two contracts at issue were the successor MBAs to the WGA–AMPTP Minimum Basic Agreement (expiring 1 May 2023) and the SAG-AFTRA–AMPTP TV/Theatrical/Streaming Agreement (expiring 30 June 2023, later extended). The AMPTP's member companies in that round were Amazon Studios, Apple Studios, Lionsgate, MGM, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Global, Sony Pictures, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery — the same studio and streamer bloc against which both unions were bargaining in parallel. The technology context was the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid integration of generative tools into Hollywood pre-production and development workflows; under the expiring MBA and TV/Theatrical agreement, neither writers nor performers had any negotiated mechanism to constrain how the studios used those tools, whose material they trained them on, or how their output was credited.

Writer demands on AI crystallised in WGA Pattern of Demands tabled in early 2023 and held through the strike: AI cannot be a writer; AI-generated material cannot be source material; writers cannot be required to use AI; companies must disclose AI material; and the Guild's rights to challenge the use of writers' material to train AI must be reserved. Performer demands tracked a related but distinct logic, organised around the unfamiliar problem of the digital replica: any digital reproduction of a performer's voice, likeness, or performance — whether built during employment or independently from photos and prior footage — required informed consent, negotiated compensation, and a clear bargaining channel for the technology categories the contract had not yet stabilised.

The AMPTP's initial offer on the SAG-AFTRA AI track — that studios could scan a background performer for one day's pay and then use the resulting digital replica indefinitely and exclusively, at no further cost — became the public emblem of the dispute and the proximate trigger for the actors' strike call.

The strikes

The WGA strike began at 12:01 am PT on 2 May 2023 and ran for 148 days, tying the 1960 strike for the second-longest in WGA history (behind 1988's 153 days). WGA leadership through the strike comprised chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman (who took the role from David Young in February 2023), Negotiating Committee co-chairs David A. Goodman and Chris Keyser, and a 26-member Negotiating Committee.

The SAG-AFTRA strike followed on 14 July 2023, after a 98% strike-authorisation vote on 5 June and the AMPTP's failure to make acceptable offers on AI and streaming residuals. SAG-AFTRA was led through the bargaining and strike by president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland; the AMPTP bargaining team was led by long-serving AMPTP president Carol Lombardini, joined for the closing rounds by Bob Iger (Disney), David Zaslav (Warner Bros. Discovery), Ted Sarandos (Netflix), and Donna Langley (NBCUniversal). The actors' strike ran 118 days — the longest actors' strike against Hollywood studios in the union's history — and produced what the joint picket lines and the Drescher-led press cycle made the most prominent mainstream-media framing of generative AI as a labour question to that point in the technology's public life. Drescher's 13 July strike-call press conference framed AI publicly as "an existential threat to creative professions" and positioned the strike as a fight "for everybody in the industry."

The WGA AI provisions

The Writers Guild and AMPTP reached a tentative agreement on 24 September 2023; WGA leadership approved it on 26 September; the WGA strike formally ended on 27 September; and the membership ratified the new MBA on 9 October 2023 with a 99% vote in favour. The contract took effect 25 September 2023 and is stated to expire on 1 May 2026.

The MBA's Article 5 (Artificial Intelligence) — the four-clause core that has since been the most widely reproduced part of the contract — provides as follows. First, no form of AI, generative or otherwise, is a writer: material produced by traditional AI or generative AI cannot be "literary material" or "source material" under the MBA, which forecloses the use of AI output to dilute a writer's credit, separated rights, or compensation. Second, a writer may choose to use AI in performing writing services only with the company's consent and subject to company policy, but the company cannot require a writer to use AI. Third, the company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material. Fourth, the WGA expressly reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers' material to train AI is prohibited by the MBA or other law — preserving, rather than resolving, the training-data question. The contract also obliges each signatory production company to meet with the Guild at least semi-annually (at the Guild's request) to discuss and review information related to the company's use and intended use of generative AI in motion-picture development and production.

Read together, as the Center for Democracy and Technology noted in its post-ratification analysis, the AI clauses are organised around who counts as a "writer" rather than around AI capability as such — a structural choice that has made the WGA template unusually portable to non-Hollywood labour contexts.

The SAG-AFTRA AI provisions

SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP reached a tentative agreement at 12:01 am PST on 9 November 2023; the SAG-AFTRA National Board approved it on 10 November by 86% and recommended a "yes" vote; the membership ratified the contract on 5 December 2023 by 78.33% on a 38.15% turnout. The AI architecture of the contract — analysed in detail by Perkins Coie and by SAG-AFTRA's own AI resource pages — turns on a categorical division of the AI-generated-content space into five named categories, each with its own consent and compensation regime.

Employment-Based Digital Replicas are digital replicas of a specific performer's voice or likeness, created during the performer's employment with their active participation, and used for scenes or material the performer did not actually film. Their creation requires clear and conspicuous consent from the performer, a generally 48-hour notice period, and separate consent for use in subsequent projects; compensation comprises payment for the creation time itself plus residuals equivalent to what the performer would have been paid had they actually performed the work.

Independently Created Digital Replicas are replicas built without the performer's active participation, using existing materials such as photographs or prior footage. Their use requires the performer's clear and conspicuous consent (subject to limited First Amendment exceptions), with compensation freely negotiable between the parties and subject to pension and health contributions.

Background-Actor Digital Replicas are replicas of background performers' voices or likenesses, created with the performer's participation, for use in scenes the performer did not actually shoot. Their creation requires clear and conspicuous consent and 48-hour notice, a full day's pay for the scan, and separate consent for any subsequent project use. Crucially, background replicas cannot displace working background actors in daily background counts — addressing the studio's original "one day, indefinite use" proposal — and if a replica is later upgraded to principal use, the original performer is paid at principal rates.

Synthetic Performers are digitally created characters that are not voiced by, and do not resemble, an identifiable real performer. Studios proposing to use a synthetic performer in lieu of a human performer must notify SAG-AFTRA and afford the union a bargaining opportunity; if a synthetic performer's principal facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, ears) are AI-prompted to resemble those of an identifiable real performer, bargaining and consent with that performer are required. The contract commits the parties to ongoing dialogue throughout the contract term on synthetic-performer compensation — explicitly deferring rather than fixing that question.

Digital Alterations are digital edits to recorded performer footage. They generally require clear and conspicuous consent from the affected actor, with a reasonably specific description of intended alterations, except where the photography or soundtrack remains substantially as scripted, performed, or recorded. Where a background actor's lip or facial movements are digitally altered to add dialogue, the performer must be upgraded to day-performer status — the most direct contractual answer to the studio's interest in retroactive dialogue insertion via AI.

Campaign actors and tactics

The two unions did not bargain jointly — each ran a separate negotiation — but they were structurally aligned for most of 2023. SAG-AFTRA's leadership repeatedly walked WGA picket lines through May and June, and Drescher's July 2023 strike-call press conference framed the actors' strike explicitly as an act of solidarity with the writers and an attempt to consolidate the joint bargaining leverage of two simultaneous strikes. The political logic of that alignment was that the AMPTP could not credibly settle one strike on terms that prejudiced the other — and AI, more than any other issue, was a topic on which the AMPTP could only afford to make peace with one union if it was prepared to make peace with both.

Tactically, the campaign deployed picketing, strike-fund organising, social-media mobilisation around member livelihoods, sustained press cycles built around named figures (Drescher; Bryan Cranston; Crabtree-Ireland on the actors' side, and Goodman, Keyser, and Stutzman on the writers' side), and a steady drip of named picket-line and rally appearances by aligned actors and writers. The AI-specific tactical innovation was rhetorical: the unions converted AI from a technical bargaining topic into a public-facing framing about who gets to be the author of cultural work — Drescher's "existential threat to creative professions" line, the WGA's "AI is not a writer" framing — and used that framing to convert AI provisions into a hard line that the membership would not cross.

Reception and significance for the broader AI-good movement

In the months after ratification, the agreements were taken up as a sectoral template across US creative-industry organising. The Authors Guild wrote that the WGA MBA's structure — disclosure, no-mandate, no-AI-as-author, reserved training-data rights — was a model for the Guild's own subsequent advocacy in publishing; the Guild's statement on the SAG-AFTRA agreement drew the same line for performers and likeness-based creative work. The Concept Art Association, whose own AI advocacy began in late 2022, has framed its work as part of the same sectoral wave of professional-community organising against generative AI that the Hollywood unions consolidated. International trade-union commentary — for example Equal Times, the ITUC-affiliated international labour press — recorded Crabtree-Ireland's framing that the SAG-AFTRA deal was "a precedent for other industries" and pointed to subsequent invocations of the Hollywood template by, among others, German YouTubers organising with IG Metall for greater algorithmic transparency.

For the wider make-AI-good movement that this corpus is mapping, the 2023 strikes mark four enduring contributions. First, they are the first major US collective-bargaining settlement on the public record to bind generative AI in categorical, enforceable contract language rather than by general principle — a working answer to the question of whether the AI policy frontier could be moved by labour rather than by legislation. Second, by tying the AI provisions to a public-facing strike, the campaign converted what would have been an arcane technical bargaining track into the most-discussed AI-and-labour story of 2023 and into a model that subsequent worker formations (creative-industry sister unions, the African Content Moderators Union's training-data-side organising, the Africa Tech Workers Movement, and a growing roster of US sectoral creative-industry advocates) have been able to cite as proof of concept. Third, the WGA's "AI is not a writer" framing and SAG-AFTRA's digital-replica taxonomy entered the wider public conversation as durable framings — load-bearing rhetorical artefacts that the Center for Democracy and Technology and other public-interest commentators have used to argue for parallel protections in non-creative industries. Fourth, by deferring rather than resolving the hardest questions — training-data compensation, synthetic-performer compensation, indefinite-duration replica use, AI's interaction with residuals and streaming transparency — the contracts set the stage for the second-round bargaining now opening in 2026, with the WGA MBA expiring on 1 May 2026 and the SAG-AFTRA contract due in 2026 as well: the first time the Hollywood unions will bargain the AI track on the basis of two-and-a-half years of lived contractual experience rather than from a standing start.