SAG-AFTRA & California's Digital Replica Laws: AB 2602, AB 1836, and the AI Talent Rules (2026)

California protects performers from unauthorized AI clones through two interlocking statutes — AB 2602 (effective January 1, 2025) governs contracts with living performers under Labor Code §927, and AB 1836 (effective January 1, 2026) governs digital replicas of deceased personalities under Civil Code §3344.1 — both championed by SAG-AFTRA after the 2023 strike, and both now in full force. This guide walks through how the union's collective bargaining wins, the two state statutes, and the broader California AI talent regime actually fit together: who's covered, what the laws require, the contract language that triggers them, and what production companies and AI vendors must do to operate inside them.

Why three different things get conflated as "the SAG-AFTRA AI law"

The phrase "SAG-AFTRA AI law" gets used as shorthand for at least three legally distinct things, and untangling them is the first step toward actually understanding the regime. The first is the SAG-AFTRA collective bargaining agreement provisions — specifically the AI clauses in the union's TV/Theatrical Contract and Interactive Media Agreement, won as part of the resolution of the 2023 strike. These are private contractual rules between the union and signatory studios; they bind union members and their employers, but they are not state law. The second is California AB 2602, which is state legislation that the union sponsored and lobbied for, and which is now codified at Labor Code §927. AB 2602 governs contract terms with living performers regardless of union membership. The third is California AB 1836, also union-supported, which amends the pre-existing post-mortem right of publicity statute to address digital replicas of deceased performers.

The relationship between the three is layered, not redundant. SAG-AFTRA's collective bargaining agreement provides protections that go beyond what state law requires for union members at signatory employers. AB 2602 extends a floor of protection to all performers in California, union or not. AB 1836 extends a different kind of protection — post-mortem publicity rights — to deceased personalities and their estates. A performer working under a SAG-AFTRA contract gets all three layers; a non-union performer working in California gets AB 2602 plus, posthumously, AB 1836; a deceased performer's estate inherits AB 1836 protection regardless of any union affiliation during life.

What AB 2602 actually says (the contract rule for living performers)

AB 2602 is, structurally, a public-policy override of contract law. It does not prohibit any specific use of digital replicas — instead, it makes certain kinds of contract provisions unenforceable. The statute targets a contract provision in an agreement for personal or professional services if all three of the following are true. First, the provision allows the creation and use of a digital replica of the performer's voice or likeness in place of work the performer would otherwise have performed in person. Second, the provision does not include a "reasonably specific description" of the intended uses of the digital replica. Third, the performer was not represented during negotiation, either by legal counsel (with terms clearly and conspicuously stated in the agreement) or by a labor union under a collective bargaining agreement that addresses digital replicas.

All three conditions must be satisfied for the provision to be unenforceable. This last point matters more than it might seem at first glance, because it tells you exactly how to make a digital replica clause enforceable: include a reasonably specific description of intended uses, OR ensure the performer is represented by counsel or a qualifying union, OR both. The statute's sponsors and SAG-AFTRA have publicly suggested that both conditions need to be satisfied, but the plain language of the statute is disjunctive. Major entertainment law firms covering the bill have noted this gap, and the practical compliance posture most production companies are taking is to satisfy both conditions to leave no ambiguity.

The temporal reach of AB 2602 is also worth understanding clearly. The statute applies to new performances fixed on or after January 1, 2025. That means a contract signed in 2023 or 2024 can still trigger AB 2602 if it authorizes the creation of a digital replica performance after the effective date. A pre-2025 contract that only governed past performances is not affected. This retroactive reach to existing contracts is the main reason production companies have been re-papering talent agreements through 2025 and into 2026, even for talent already under contract.

What AB 1836 actually says (the deceased personality rule)

AB 1836 takes a different structural approach. Rather than overriding contract law, it expands an existing California cause of action. The state has long recognized a post-mortem right of publicity through Civil Code §3344.1, which gives statutory damages to the estate of any deceased personality whose name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness is used commercially without consent. The right runs for 70 years after death and is freely transferable by will, trust, or other testamentary instrument. AB 1836 amends that statute to cover digital replicas — meaning an AI-generated performance that puts the deceased into a scene they never filmed, a song they never recorded, or a commercial they never appeared in.

The damages structure is the greater of $10,000 or actual damages, plus disgorgement of any profits attributable to the unauthorized use that are not already counted in the actual damages calculation, plus attorneys' fees and costs. For commercial uses — say, an AI-generated James Dean appearing in a car commercial without estate consent — the disgorgement remedy can be substantially more meaningful than the floor amount. AB 1836 also rewrote the exemptions, narrowing them significantly. The previous statute exempted a broad category of "expressive works," including books, plays, audiovisual works, musical compositions, and works of political or newsworthy value. The new exemptions are narrower: news/public affairs/sports broadcasts; comment, criticism, scholarship, satire, or parody; documentary or historical/biographical use of the individual as themselves; fleeting or incidental use; and advertisements for any of the foregoing. The narrowing is what gives AB 1836 its real bite — under the old regime, almost any creative use was exempt; under the new regime, you need either consent from the estate or a specific exemption.

What the SAG-AFTRA contract provisions add on top

The AI provisions SAG-AFTRA won in the 2023 TV/Theatrical strike, and the parallel provisions in the 2024 Interactive Media Agreement covering video game performers, go further than AB 2602 in three ways that compliance teams should track. First, they require informed, on-the-day consent for the actual scanning or recording of a performer's likeness for digital replica use, not just upfront contractual consent. Second, they distinguish between "Employment-Based Digital Replicas" (created during a specific job for use in that production) and "Independently Created Digital Replicas" (created outside an employment context), with different consent and compensation rules for each. Third, they require ongoing compensation for use of a digital replica beyond the original production, which AB 2602 does not by itself require. Working under a SAG-AFTRA contract that addresses digital replicas can satisfy AB 2602's representation requirement, which is why SAG-AFTRA membership is now operationally relevant to AB 2602 compliance even though the statute applies to non-union performers as well.

What production companies and AI vendors must do

For production companies, the operational checklist starts with contract auditing. Any active or anticipated agreement that contemplates digital replica creation needs a reasonably specific description of intended uses — naming the project, the medium, the territorial and time scope, and the specific applications where the replica may appear. The boilerplate "all media throughout the universe in perpetuity" language that has dominated entertainment contracts for decades does not satisfy this standard for digital replica purposes. Confirm representation: either counsel for the performer (clearly and conspicuously identified in the agreement) or a qualifying collective bargaining agreement. For deceased personalities, obtain consent from the rights-holder before any digital replica use, even uses that might fall under one of AB 1836's narrowed exemptions, since the exemption analysis is fact-specific.

For AI vendors building voice cloning, avatar generation, or other replica-capable tools, the supply chain matters. Did you obtain explicit, AB 2602-compliant permission from the original performers whose data trained your model? If your training corpus was assembled before AB 2602 took effect, you have a retroactivity problem similar to the AB 2013 retroactive disclosure problem — your historical contracts likely don't cover the use you're now making of the data. The safer position, which most reputable vendors are now adopting, is to either source new training data under AB 2602-compliant agreements or to license existing professional voice and likeness data from rights holders who have themselves complied. Document everything; the disclosure regime under AB 2013 may force you to publicly characterize your training data sources, which means your AB 2602 compliance posture becomes part of your AB 2013 disclosure.

How digital replica law fits with the rest of California's 2026 AI regime

Digital replica law is one strand of a five-strand California AI regime. It pairs naturally with SB 942, which requires watermarking and provenance disclosure on AI-generated audio, image, and video content — a digital replica that satisfies AB 2602 still has to be labeled as AI-generated under SB 942 if it ships from a covered provider. It interacts with AB 2013, the training data transparency law, because the data used to train a voice or likeness model becomes part of the publicly disclosed training data summary. For frontier models above the 10^26 FLOP threshold, SB 53 adds a separate safety-process layer. And the CCPA biometric provisions interact with all of this because voice prints and facial characteristics are personal information under the CCPA, which means a digital replica project also has CCPA notice and consent obligations on top of AB 2602. Our 2026 California AI Compliance Roadmap walks through the combined sequencing.

What to watch in 2026

Three developments are worth tracking through the second half of 2026. First, the federal NO FAKES Act has been re-introduced in Congress and is gaining bipartisan momentum; if enacted, it would create a federal property right in voice and likeness that survives death, with potential preemption implications for California's AB 1836 regime. Second, the first wave of AB 2602 enforcement actions is beginning to surface in California courts, and judicial interpretation of "reasonably specific description" will materially shape what production companies actually need to write into contracts. Third, SAG-AFTRA's contracts come up for renegotiation in cycles, and the AI provisions are likely to expand further, which will continue to drive the practical compliance floor for the entire entertainment industry beyond what state law alone requires.

Sources

The primary statutes are AB 2602 on California Legislative Information and AB 1836 on California Legislative Information. For practitioner-grade analysis covering both statutes, see Fenwick & West's overview, Proskauer Rose's analysis, and Perkins Coie's five-bill summary. SAG-AFTRA publishes its TV/Theatrical and Interactive Media Agreement digital-replica provisions on the union's site for member reference. The federal NO FAKES Act status can be tracked through congress.gov.