Hollywood's two largest labor unions are publicly rejecting the framing of AI as an extinction-level threat, arguing that the industry's real problem is what the technology is already doing to workers. SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America East were the only major entertainment entities to respond when asked about the recent wave of AI apocalypse warnings from researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Lionsgate — all of which have started deploying AI in production — declined to comment.
The union response lands as former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's exit has triggered a broader wave of AI safety whistleblowing, and after Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said the technology could 'kill all humans' within the next decade. Heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and X have all called for an industry-wide slowdown. President Donald Trump has dismissed those concerns, while some US politicians have pushed for legislative action, including Governor Gavin Newsom's recent move to draft California AI 'kill switch' rules.
SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told The Verge the union saw AI's impact on member livelihoods early and moved to shape public opinion by speaking out at the earliest possible point. The 2023 actors' strike codified requirements that studios obtain permission and pay performers for the use of AI-generated digital replicas — protections the union bargained directly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
Key facts
- 01SAG-AFTRA and WGA East are the only major Hollywood entities to publicly respond to the recent wave of AI existential-risk warnings.
- 02WGA members struck for 148 days in 2023 before studios agreed to enforceable AI safeguards for film and television writers.
- 03Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger has said AI could 'kill all humans' within the next decade, a claim the unions view skeptically.
- 04Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Lionsgate declined to comment on the AI existential-risk debate.
- 05WGA East director Sam Wheeler is pointing to New York's AI regulations as a model in the absence of federal action.
Crabtree-Ireland was explicit that those contracts do not cover Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google directly, but they do bind the studios that build businesses around professional entertainment content in the United States. He credited the focused messaging of the strike with forcing AMPTP to the table.
“We bargained for and achieved enforceable, meaningful guardrails around how this technology can be implemented by the major employers in our industry”— Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator
On the extinction-risk warnings, Crabtree-Ireland was measured but skeptical. He said the public 'should be concerned about the broader societal and social implications of AI' while allowing that some warnings may be hyperbole. Hearing doom messaging 'from the CEOs of these companies or the billionaires who've made their billions off of doing the exact thing that they're now warning us might not be good' has left him unsure what to trust — though he conceded Coxon's departure gained real traction with the public.
WGA East executive director Sam Wheeler was sharper. He said the guild has long warned that unregulated AI poses an existential threat to workers, to democracy, and to the world, but framed the current warnings from AI executives as a distraction from concrete, ongoing harms.
“The recklessness of the tech oligarchs pushing AI on our society has been matched only by their rampant dishonesty”— Sam Wheeler, WGA East executive director
Wheeler pointed to the union's 148-day 2023 strike as the mechanism that produced real writer protections, and said collective bargaining is not a substitute for government regulation. He singled out New York for enacting meaningful AI rules in the absence of federal action, and listed worker disempowerment, degradation of the internet, disinformation, and rising energy costs as tangible harms AI has already exacerbated.
His central argument is one of accountability: the harms are the result of decisions made by human beings, and holding companies and executives liable for what their products do is the surest safeguard against worst-case scenarios. It is a direct rebuttal to the framing that AI risk is a matter of runaway systems rather than corporate choices.
“The WGAE believes that addressing those concrete harms and holding AI companies and their executives liable for the destruction their products cause is the surest way to safeguard against any worst-case scenarios”— Sam Wheeler, WGA East executive director
The union response fits a pattern AI Chat Daily has tracked in recent weeks, from King Charles warning of existential AI dangers to MIT Technology Review examining the 'will AI kill us all' question head-on. What SAG-AFTRA and WGA East add is a labor perspective grounded in a fight that has already been fought and partially won at the bargaining table, rather than a hypothetical about future models.
The critique is not that AI safety concerns are illegitimate — it is that the loudest voices raising them are the same executives profiting from the deployment. That charge is harder to dismiss when the messengers are unions that spent 148 days on picket lines securing concrete protections against the same technology.
For AI companies, the labor pushback matters because it fractures the coalition needed for federal AI legislation. If unions and workplace-safety advocates prioritize liability for present-day harms while frontier labs push existential-risk frameworks, the resulting regulatory package could look very different from what companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have been lobbying for — with disclosure, licensing, and liability regimes aimed at deployment, not at hypothetical superintelligence. That is a considerably more expensive future for the labs than one focused on long-horizon safety research.
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