Directors open AI talks with the studios

The Directors Guild of America, known as the DGA, is the union representing film and television directors in the United States. It has about 19,000 members. Every few years, the DGA negotiates a new contract with the AMPTP, which stands for Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and represents the major film studios and streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney and Amazon. The central issue in 2026 is whether studios can use a director's creative work to train AI systems. When an AI learns to generate film scenes by studying thousands of existing films, the directors who made those films receive nothing. The DGA wants the contract to restrict this, or require payment. SAG-AFTRA, the actors' and performers' union, just settled its own four-year AMPTP deal in May 2026. It just reached a four-year deal with AMPTP in May 2026. The actors won the right to approve any use of their digital likeness (an AI copy of their face and voice), but did not win the Tilly tax. The Tilly tax was a proposed fee studios would pay every time an AI-generated character replaced a real actor. The studios rejected it. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) settled earlier in 2026 on similar terms: studios must notify writers when licensing their work for AI training, but do not have to pay for it. Christopher Nolan, the British filmmaker known for Oppenheimer and Inception, became DGA President and is leading these negotiations. His public position is that studios must also raise their contributions to the DGA health fund, which covers medical costs for members.