SAG-AFTRA has ratified a four-year deal with Hollywood studios placing new limits on AI performers, backed by 91.4% of those voting. The catch: no strike rights over AI until 2030.
SAG-AFTRA members have voted to ratify a four-year contract with the major Hollywood studios, with AI protections at its heart and a long-contested pension merger finally resolved.
Of those who voted, 91.4% backed the deal, with 19.3% of eligible members turning out. The result gives the union a mandate, though precisely how much of one, given the low turnout, is open to question.
Other than some contested pension fund changes, AI is, as you would expect, at the forefront of the union’s thinking. As Variety reports, the contract's headline AI provision requires producers to demonstrate "significant additional value" before deploying an AI performer in place of a live actor or that actor's existing digital avatar. Union leadership argues that, combined with an arbitration clause, this will confine synthetic performers to a small number of edge cases rather than becoming a routine production tool.
"We feel very confident what we've been able to achieve here is in the vanguard of what any industry wants to achieve," said SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin. Executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland called the deal a step forward from the consent-and-payment terms won during the 2023 actors' strike, saying it would "ensure synthetics remain the exception in our industry instead of the rule.”
Not everyone in the union is persuaded. Critics within the organization argue the "significant additional value" bar is too vague to hold, and that studios will test its limits. As part of the deal’s detail, the union will receive notice and bargaining rights if synthetic actor use begins to scale. But, and this is a big but, it will not have the ability to call a strike over AI until 2030.
Agreeing to a four-year term rather than the usual three has also drawn criticism, given how quickly AI capabilities are moving. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP, effectively the employers in the negotiations) made a longer period of labour peace its top negotiating priority across all union agreements this cycle, wanting to avoid another 2023.
Indeed, the WGA (Writers’ Guild of America, the other party in 2023’s strike action) ratified its own four-year deal in April. AI was again a key part of the negotiations, but the safeguards ended up notably weaker than SAG-AFTRA’s. The studios agreed to notify the guild if they license writers' work for AI training, and to hold ongoing consultation meetings, but crucially there was no requirement to pay writers when their scripts are used to train AI models. It seems that WGA members traded AI enforcement for an urgently needed $321 million infusion into their health plan.
Meanwhile, negotiations with the Directors Guild of America continue, with its contract expiring on June 30. AI is again a central issue. The DGA’s 2023 contract was notable for being the first in Hollywood to include explicit language barring studios from delegating directors' creative work to generative AI, and the union wants to strengthen and renew those guardrails. Jobs are the other dominant issue, with declining production having hit DGA members hard.
With both WGA and SAG-AFTRA having signed four-year deals, the expectation is that the DGA will follow suit. But the DGA is pushing for the strongest creative control over any use of AI and negotiations over the next few weeks are expected to be fairly tense as a result.