The Writers Guild is now urging production companies to initiate lawsuits against technology enterprises that have been caught using copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence systems. This includes using open-source subtitles from TV shows and movies, where AI developers have reportedly imported vast amounts of dialogue crafted by Guild members into their expansive language models without any financial compensation.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, which covered an open letter from the union released today, the Guild is calling for movie studios to unleash their full legal power against what they refer to as “wholesale theft,” “looting,” and “copying.” The letter highlights that the existing agreements between the studios and the Guild obligate the studios to protect the copyrights of works they manage “in trust,” while also criticizing the studios for permitting tech companies to exploit extensive libraries without authorization or payment.

The letter points to an article dated November 2024 in The Atlantic, where journalist Alex Reisner noted that a massive dataset from the website OpenSubtitles was utilized by corporations like Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and others to enhance their large language models (LLMs). This dataset includes substantial volumes of scripted dialogue from various TV shows and movies, including every Best Picture nominee from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. Essentially, this represents a treasure trove of Hollywood scripts available at little to no cost.

Below is the complete text of the Guild’s letter:

The November 18 article in The Atlantic titled “There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing is Powering AI” confirms a well-known fact: tech companies have raided the studios’ intellectual property—a rich repository of works produced by generations of union workers—to train their AI systems. With billions in capital accumulated through this comprehensive theft, these tech companies now aim to sell costly services back to the studios that plagiarize the works created by WGA members and Hollywood laborers.

The studios, holding copyrights to works authored by WGA members, have taken no action to prevent this theft. They have allowed tech firms to ransack entire collections without consent or compensation, directly harming WGA members.

Under the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement—the MBA—studios are expressly required to defend their copyrights for writers. Article 50 of the MBA states that studios maintain “in trust” rights for certain authors of original works. Authors who have “separated rights” in these works per Article 16.B retain all additional rights in the material, including rights to utilize the works for AI training purposes. As trustees of these rights, studios have a fiduciary duty to prevent unauthorized use of the works for AI training.

It is time for studios to take action. After decades spent combating piracy, they cannot remain passive while tech companies appropriate entire libraries for their profit. Studios must promptly take legal steps against any company that has employed our members’ works to train AI systems.