SAG-AFTRA 2025 Commercials Contract: digital replica and synthetic performer provisions

The 2025 Commercials Contract, effective April 1, 2025, was the first SAG-AFTRA agreement to set out detailed digital replica and synthetic performer consent provisions. The TV/Theatrical side followed. That order matters, because it means the drafting conventions the whole industry now uses were worked out in commercials first — including the Digital Replica Rider at Exhibit 3, jointly drafted by SAG-AFTRA and the Joint Policy Committee. It also means the Commercials Contract is the only one of the two that supplies a standardised form.

It also matters because commercial work is where AI techniques actually landed at volume. A feature might carry one significant replica sequence. A campaign might carry a generated presenter, a voice model for regional versioning, an AI-extended crowd and forty cutdowns, produced across three vendors on a six-week schedule with no in-house legal function anywhere in the chain.

Consent must be clear and conspicuous, and must be based on a reasonably specific description of the intended use of the digital replica. Consent may be granted through the Digital Replica Rider at Exhibit 3, appended to the performer’s employment contract, or in a separate writing signed by the performer. Because a standardised form exists here, any substitute you use should be checked against Exhibit 3 before it goes out.

In a commercials context, “intended use” has to do more work than it does in scripted, because commercial use is defined by dimensions that are not visible in the finished asset: the term of the buy, the territory, the media types, the versioning. A description that would be adequate for a feature sequence — naming the technique and the scene — is thin for a campaign, where the performer’s real question is how long, where, and in how many versions.

The other structural feature of commercials is renewal. Campaigns come back. A replica consent written for a flight is not a consent for the next flight, and a production that treats it as one is relying on an interpretation rather than a document. Re-execution at renewal is cheap; reconstructing consent after a campaign has run is not.

The contract addresses synthetic performers as well as replicas of real performers, and the two are genuinely different problems. A replica implicates a specific person’s consent. A synthetic performer — a figure generated to read as human but not recognizable as any actual person — implicates the union relationship and, since June 9, 2026 in New York, a disclosure obligation to the audience.

For commercial producers this is the highest-frequency failure mode in the category, because a generated presenter feels like an asset rather than a casting decision. It comes in as a rendered file from a vendor, gets treated like stock, and never reaches anyone who would have flagged it. The fix is procedural rather than legal: a synthetic performer register that records what was generated, by which vendor, using which tool, on what material, and why the production used a generated figure rather than a performer.

A union commercial in 2026 is rarely governed by only one thing. The contract sets the consent standard. New York adds a disclosure obligation where a synthetic performer appears in a commercial advertisement running there. California and Illinois add informed-consent requirements for replica use that substitutes for work a performer would otherwise have done in person. Google requires AI disclosure on Search, YouTube and Discover as of July 9, 2026, and Meta requires AI-generated content disclosure labels on sponsored content. If the campaign runs in the EU, Article 50 transparency obligations attach to the asset itself.

None of these ask for the same artifact, but they all ask about the same underlying facts: what was generated, whose likeness was involved, who consented to what, and what the audience was told. Capturing those facts once, at intake, is the difference between five separate compliance exercises and one.