WGA East Partners with Cloak to Shield Writers' Scripts from AI Training

The Writers Guild of America, East unveiled a partnership on Tuesday that gives its members free access to Cloak, a software program designed to stop AI models from training on writers' work. The tool creates copies of files that remain readable for humans but illegible to machines.

Cloak will sit inside the union's benefits program. It addresses a specific fear among writers: that scripts sent to producers or agents become raw material for AI systems without consent.

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

Who can use Cloak, and what does it cost?

The pricing structure splits along membership lines:

• WGAE members receive Cloak for free through the union's benefits program.
• Non-members can register a script through the guild's website and add Cloak protection for $10, on top of existing registration fees.

The partnership grew out of the guild's AI Task Force, which has pushed protections on multiple fronts as generative AI has spread through the entertainment industry.

"For the past three 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," Cloak founder Rishi Ambavanekar said. "I hope Cloak can keep creative writing in the hands of people and not as data being processed by machines."

What does this change for writers?

Until now, writers had contract language and legislation as their main defenses against AI. Cloak adds a technical layer. Ambavanekar noted there had been no "real technically-sound way to fight back against AI and determine how the content you create actually interacts with it." The tool aims to close that gap before a script ever leaves a writer's hands.

The broader context is labor anxiety. AI's capacity to alter and diminish the entertainment workforce has become an existential concern in recent years, and the WGAE and other guilds have negotiated AI protections into new union contracts.

"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," said Larry J. Cohen, co-chair of the AI Task Force. He said the guild is advocating for protections "not just through our contracts, but through legislation and member education," calling the Cloak partnership "a natural and necessary extension of our fight to protect our members' creative rights and the integrity of their work."

How effective is the tool?

Cloak, founded in September 2025, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz's start-up accelerator Speedrun and the University of Pennsylvania, according to the company's LinkedIn page. Its website claims recent tests proved the software "effective" against Anthropic's Claude model up to Fable 5.1, Google's Gemini model up to 3.8, and OpenAI's ChatGPT model up to GPT-6 Astra, as well as against automated summaries generated by Google Drive, Gmail, and Adobe Acrobat.

Those claims come from the company itself and have not been independently verified. Still, the partnership signals a shift: unions are now deploying software alongside contract negotiations, and writers who register through the guild gain a tool that its founder says will let them share their work "far and wide" with renewed confidence.