WGA East gives writers Cloak to make scripts unreadable to AI

The Writers Guild of America East said on October 20, 2026 that Cloak, software the guild describes as rendering documents unreadable to most AI models while preserving their formatting for human readers, is free to its more than 7,500 members and costs everyone else $10 when they register a script with the guild.

The union announced the partnership with Cloak on its own press page, dated Tuesday October 20, 2026. Cloak's site carries the same date above write-ups from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, IndieWire and TheWrap. Members reach the tool through their benefits page at wgaeast.org. Non-members add it inside WGAE Script Registration.

The terms have one detail worth pricing out. A WGAE Script Registration creates a dated record of a writer's claim to authorship. The guild's release states that a registration lasts 10 years and costs $25 for non-members or $10 for members, and that the Cloak add-on costs $10 on top, which puts a non-member's registered and cloaked script at $35. The guild says the service is used by tens of thousands of writers and other creatives each year.

Cloak is patent-pending software, per the same release. Its FAQ describes the mechanism in two moves: most AI models either extract a document's embedded text directly or render the page and run optical character recognition on the image, and Cloak "embeds countermeasures in the document designed to resist both approaches."

The effectiveness figures come from Cloak's own testing, and they carry a date. The FAQ states that as of October 19, 2026 its tests held against the chat interfaces of Claude models up to Fable 5.1, Gemini models up to 3.8 and ChatGPT models up to GPT-6 Astra, and against the automated summaries in Google Drive, Gmail and Adobe Acrobat. The same answer adds a caveat: "However, our ChatGPT testing has shown varied effectiveness at the Extra High and Pro effort settings." The write-ups SLOP TV read reported the terms of the partnership rather than testing the tool.

Cloak was founded by Rishi Ambavanekar and Tyler Sacharow, described in Venture Lab's announcement as an all-freshmen team at the University of Pennsylvania. Their venture won the tenth annual Startup Challenge on May 1, 2026, taking the $75,000 Perlman Grand Prize plus a $10,000 new-venture collaboration award and a $10,000 undergraduate award, per Wharton's release. That release describes Cloak's market as publishers of news, novels and screenplays, and its plan as offering "either full protection or opt-in monetization of training and inference."

Three people are quoted in the announcement. Tom Fontana, president of the Writers Guild of America East, said in a statement that the partnership means members "don't need to worry that their work will be used to train AI models after they send it to producers or agents" or that "the product of weeks, months, or years of work will be reduced to an AI-generated summary of an email attachment." Larry J. Cohen, co-chair of the guild's AI Task Force, called the deal "a natural and necessary extension of our fight to protect our members' creative rights and the integrity of their work."

Cloak's founder, Ambavanekar, said he developed the tool over the past three years as a way to "give agency back to writers to protect against unwanted AI training, AI notes, and analysis."

The partnership extends a campaign the guild has run since the 148-day strike of 2023, which produced the AI provisions in the Minimum Basic Agreement. The guild now runs an #AINeedsHumans campaign with a Day of Action set for October 30, and it backs the New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act, which passed the state legislature and is under consideration by Governor Kathy Hochul, according to the guild's release. In July the guild withdrew its sponsorship and participation from the 30th Urbanworld Film Festival, ending a 12-year partnership, after the festival added AI-generated films to its programming, as Blex Media reported, citing Variety's interview with festival founder Stacy Spikes.

For a writer weighing the $35, the add-on covers one route a script leaks by: the copy a reader forwards on to a model. It does not touch a script read on screen, retyped, or pasted into a chat window, and Cloak's own caveat says the protection is uneven at ChatGPT's highest effort settings. The resistance Cloak measures is also pinned to specific model versions on one date, so a new version is a new test.

Cloak is available to WGA East members now through the benefits page at wgaeast.org, and to non-members as a $10 add-on to a Script Registration at scriptregistration.org.