Gaming

SAG-AFTRA Won the AI Fight Last Year, and Its Playbook Is Now the Industry Standard

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 15, 2026

Last year, SAG-AFTRA publicly released its proposed AI terms for ending the video game strike, and the move changed the shape of the negotiation. The union's response to the game companies' April 30 offer, issued May 2 and shared openly, laid out detailed counters on how performers' voices, faces and movements can be used by generative AI. Anyone could read the playbook: the terms, the reasoning, and the plain language explanations behind them. It worked. The strike was suspended in June 2025 and members ratified the new Interactive Media Agreement that July, with AI protections baked in.

The substance was precise. The union wanted 'voiced dialogue' widened to 'vocal material' so monster growls and creature efforts get the same protection as spoken lines. It proposed a Secondary Performance Payment, a one time payment protecting performance capture actors from being fully displaced by generative AI, and showed flexibility on the amount, accepting an annual audit and making the payment optional rather than mandatory. It rejected a 12 month limit on reporting AI use of a performance, on the grounds that games take far longer than a year to build.

The consent provisions were the heart of it. Studios wanted franchise wide replica use at minimum scale, with each new use proceeding automatically. The union's position: companies always tell the worker and get explicit consent first. Usage reports must show both the amount of material created, lines and estimated days, and the payment attached to it, so performers can see what their work was worth. The union also rejected unlimited buyouts of replica rights, insisting on strong, clear justification for any buyout, and arguing that buyouts structurally favor employers and make sustainable careers harder to build.

Context matters. The strike ran nearly a year, from July 2024 to the July 2025 ratification, and performers won bipartisan congressional backing for the NO FAKES Act when it was reintroduced on May 20, 2026. Studios had already begun recasting during the strike: voice actors Emeri Chase and Nicholas Thurkettle were replaced in MiHoYo's Zenless Zone Zero in March 2025 after Chase declined work outside the union's interim agreement. The companies' position moved too: where employers once wanted AI protections to cover only new performances, they accepted coverage for any work done under the interactive media agreement, whenever it was recorded.

Publishing the terms was the masterstroke. A private proposal can be dismissed in a boardroom; a public standard gets measured against every studio in the industry, quoted by lawmakers, and adopted by smaller developers who want to do right by their actors. The final contract kept the core of it: consent, disclosure, and compensation floors for digital replicas. SAG-AFTRA wrote the first widely readable draft of digital likeness rights for games, and it became the deal. For performers, that is leverage that outlives any single negotiation. For players, it is a promise that the voices they love belong to the people who gave them.

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