April 6, 2026
Hollywood studios read the mainstream cultural room and decided now is not the time to fight about AI with the Writers Guild of America (WGA). On Saturday, the WGA announced that it had reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the organization representing film and TV studios, to secure a new contract with screenwriters.
“Today the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously approved a four-year tentative agreement with the AMPTP for the 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA),” the WGA revealed on its website. “Crucially, it protects our health plan and puts it on a sustainable path, with increased company contributions across many areas and long-needed increases to health contribution caps. The new contract also builds on gains from 2023 and helps address free work challenges.”
The WGA hasn’t yet revealed what new language regarding AI is in the new contract, but just a few months ago, the organization outlined its goals for AI in the new contract.
“Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) has become a key issue for the Guild and the entertainment industry broadly, with potential implications for the employment and compensation of many creative workers,” the WGA stated just over two months before entering into negotiations with the AMPTP. “The 2023 MBA established groundbreaking AI protections for writers; the WGAW will strongly enforce these new MBA provisions. In addition, the WGAW is engaged in policy advocacy against the theft and exploitation of writers’ works by AI models.”
What are those protections?
•The contract states that AI systems cannot be considered as a writer, nor can AI be considered literary material upon which a screenplay is developed.
•Furthermore, unlike many major corporations adopting AI, studios cannot force a writer to use AI in their work.
•And if a writer is given source material generated by AI, the studio must disclose that it has been AI-generated.
•A studio cannot hire a writer to rewrite an AI-generated script and then pay them the lower rewrite fee instead of the full screenplay fee.
•Finally, “The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA [the Minimum Basic Agreement] or other law,” which leaves the door open for legal moves in case allegations of such arise.
Are these protections enough? That’s still unclear, but we’ll know soon whether the WGA was able to slip in some modified language to strengthen the existing writer protections as AI systems continue to evolve and become more adept at mimicking human writing. Despite this apparent win, this doesn’t mean that the SAG-AFTRA negotiations with AMPTP will follow the same course, as the stakes are even higher given the rapid advance of AI tools like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, Google’s Veo 3, Runway, and others.
Cover Image by Izayah Ramos (modified by MARS Magazine) via Unsplash
