SAG-AFTRA, the US union representing around 160,000 screen actors, television and radio artists, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP, the studios' negotiating body) will restart contract talks on 27 April 2026, according to the Hollywood Reporter1. Chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told outlets 'airtight AI protections' are a precondition for any longer-term deal.
Central to SAG-AFTRA's demand is the so-called Tilly Tax, a proposed royalty studios would pay every time an AI-generated performer replaces a human actor in a production. The label comes from Tilly Norwood, described in trade-press coverage as a digital AI character whose launch marketing last year crystallised performer fears about wholesale substitution. The mechanism is structurally closer to a music performance right than to a one-off licensing fee: per-use, keyed to a substitution the producer would otherwise make without compensation.
The backdrop is the Writers Guild of America deal on 4 April, in which studios conceded notification on AI training use but refused payment, resolving the solvency crisis while leaving the principle unresolved (ID:EV07). SAG-AFTRA inherits the unresolved fight. Union negotiation leverage depends on the visibility of the substitution; writers are invisible in the final product, actors are not. That asymmetry explains why the WGA settled on notification and the performers' union has held out for payment.
The 10-percentage-point lifetime earnings cost Goldman documented for young displaced workers is what the Tilly Tax is trying to price at point of replacement. The 27 April session is the first collective-bargaining test of whether performers can establish a per-use compensation mechanism before that compounding sets in. The Tilly Tax is structurally distinct from a one-off licensing fee: it routes value back to the substituted party at point of use, which is what per-rerun performer residuals did for television in 1948.
If a Tilly Tax survives the 27 April session in any form, other performer unions internationally gain a bargaining template. If it does not, the AI-replacement right becomes a 1948-style unsettled dispute with no precedent to lean on, at the moment Meta, IBM and the Indian Big-4 are writing the displacement pipeline the Tilly Tax would have taxed.
