WGA East Partners With Cloak to Shield Scripts From AI

By Daniel Okafor

The Writers Guild of America East has struck a deal with Cloak, an AI shielding tool that makes screenplays resistant to scraping by most AI models while preserving their formatting. Members get it free. Non-members pay $10 once they register a script with the guild.

The partnership, announced without a price tag attached to the guild's side of the arrangement, is the WGAE's latest move in a three-year standoff with AI companies over training data. The union has long maintained that using scripts to train AI models does not constitute fair use, and that years of such training happened without writers' explicit permission. Now the guild has a technical answer, not just a legal argument.

What does the tool actually do?

Cloak's software alters a script so most AI models can't ingest it cleanly, while the document still reads and formats normally for humans. Think of it as a lock that doesn't spoil the view. The stated aim: make it harder for models to train on writers' work after it leaves their hands and lands with producers or agents.

WGAE president Tom Fontana said in a statement: "The WGAE partnership with Cloak expands our efforts to protect members' work and fight back against AI companies exploiting writers and other creative workers."

He added that the deal means "members don't need to worry that their work will be used to train AI models after they send it to producers or agents – or simply that the product of weeks, months, or years of work will be reduced to an AI-generated summary of an email attachment."

That last clause stings because it's already routine. A screenplay becomes an attachment; the attachment becomes a summary; the summary becomes somebody's prompt.

Who built it, and why now?

Cloak founder Rishi Ambavanekar framed the tool as a response to a degraded default. "For the past 3 years, the assumption was that anything you put out onto the internet is at risk of being ingested by AI, so I developed Cloak as a way to give agency back to writers to protect against unwanted AI training, AI notes, and analysis," he said.

He added: "I hope Cloak can keep creative writing in the hands of people and not as data being processed by machines."

The deal runs through the WGAE's AI task force. Its co-chair, Larry J. Cohen, called the partnership a "natural and necessary extension of our fight to protect our members' creative rights and the integrity of our work."

Cohen didn't mince words about the industry's sales pitch. "Generative AI models are often falsely advertised on the promise that they will make our work obsolete, but the truth is, the creative process is human and always will be," he said, noting the Guild is pushing protections through contracts, legislation and member education.

How does this fit the guild's wider AI fight?

The WGAE has been broadly resistant to AI's entry into filmmaking, and its record shows it:

• It ended its 12-year partnership with Urbanworld, the BIPOC-focused film festival, in July over the festival's new programming lane for AI-generated films and shorts.
• It launched the #AINeedsHumans campaign to mobilize members around the technology's improper use.
• It made AI a pillar of negotiations with Hollywood studios during its 148-day strike in 2023.

The Cloak deal signals a shift in tactics: from picket lines and contract language to software distributed at scale. If scraping-resistant scripts become standard practice among the guild's thousands of writers, AI developers may find their supply of free screenplay data drying up one protected PDF at a time.