SAG-AFTRA 2026 TV/Theatrical Agreement: the AI and digital replica provisions

The 2026 Theatrical/Television Agreement between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP was ratified on June 4, 2026, with 91.42% of voting members in favor. It became effective on July 1, 2026 and expires on June 30, 2030.

The AI and digital replica provisions sit at General Provisions §§ 64 and 64.1. For most producers the consequential change is not that digital replicas became permissible — replicas were already being negotiated deal by deal — but that the agreement fixes a consent standard with a specific evidentiary shape. Consent must be clear and conspicuous, and it must be based on a reasonably specific description of the intended use of the Digital Replica.

Those two phrases carry the weight. “Clear and conspicuous” governs how the consent is presented: it is not satisfied by a clause a performer would not reasonably notice, folded into the middle of a long-form deal memo. “A reasonably specific description of the intended use” governs what the consent actually covers. A blanket grant of the right to use a performer’s replica in any medium now known or hereafter devised is close to the paradigm of what the standard is aimed at, because it describes no particular use at all.

The agreement also distinguishes between an Employment-Based Digital Replica — one created using a performer’s work under an employment contract, such as a scan session or plates shot on the production — and an Independently Created Digital Replica, made without the performer being employed to create it. Both require consent. The second carries an additional documentation burden, because you also have to be able to say where the underlying material came from.

The practical test is not whether the performer signed something. It is whether a person reading the file two years later — an E&O underwriter, a network standards reviewer, a distributor’s delivery desk, or opposing counsel — can match the use that shipped to the use that was described at the time of consent.

A description like “digital replica may be used in the Picture and in any and all media” fails that test: it does not describe a use, it describes a universe. A description like “replica of Performer’s face composited onto a stunt double for the rooftop sequence in Episode 104, and for continuity fixes to dialogue already performed by Performer in Episodes 101–106, for use in the Series and its trailers and promotional materials” can be checked. Someone can hold that sentence against the finished cut and say yes or no.

That is the reason the intended-use description belongs in the workflow before the scan session, not after it. Once material exists, the description tends to get written to fit what was made, which is precisely backwards from the standard the agreement sets.

Four patterns account for most of the gaps. First, consent obtained for the shoot but never extended to the use invented in post — the de-age nobody planned, the line replaced with a voice model, the actor placed in a scene they were not called for. The consent instrument on file describes a scan; the finished picture contains something else.

Second, the rider is signed but the intended-use description is written afterward, sometimes by an assistant, sometimes copied from another project. Third, background and crowd replication gets treated as a technical process rather than a likeness question, because the vendor described it as a “tile” or a “population pass” rather than as replicas of identifiable performers.

Fourth, and most damaging at delivery: nobody kept a shot-level record. The production can produce signed consents, but cannot say which shots the replica actually appears in. That is the question a delivery desk asks, and an unanswerable version of it is what turns a two-week delivery into a two-month one.

The union agreement is a floor for covered work, not the whole picture. California, Illinois and New York impose their own informed-consent requirements for digital replica use, which apply regardless of whether a production is signatory. New York separately requires a conspicuous disclosure when a commercial advertisement depicts a synthetic performer. If your title reaches the EU, the AI Act’s Article 50 transparency obligations attach to the content itself rather than to the employment relationship.

These regimes do not neatly nest. A consent that satisfies the union standard is not automatically sufficient under a state informed-consent statute, and neither of them produces the machine-readable marking Article 50 contemplates. The practical answer is a single record built once — who consented, to what use, when, evidenced how — that can be presented to each of them in the form they expect.