Inside Hollywood’s battle against AI after infamous Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt ‘fight’

Shortly after a now-infamous Seedance video depicting Tom Cruise “fighting” Brad Pitt sent Hollywood into conniptions, WME’s co-chair was blitzing Capitol Hill. Christian Muirhead met with Senators and the White House to gin up interest in the NO FAKES Act, a Senate bill seeking to protect people, like, well, Cruise and Pitt from unauthorized uses of their likeness by generative AI.

Muirhead, whose agency reps clients from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to Hugh Jackman and Emma Stone, held extended sit-downs with Sens. Chris Coons and Marsha Blackburn — who authored the bill with Thom Tillis and Amy Klobuchar — as well as Reps. Ted Lieu and Josh Gottheimer, who co-chair the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy. He also met with Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, we hear. 

The bill would make companies and individuals liable for creating and distributing unauthorized digital replicas of someone’s voice or likeness. It would also hold platforms liable for hosting such deepfakes if they were aware they were made without consent, and it would override any state laws on the issue. The bill was first introduced in ’24 but failed to gain approval and was re-introduced last April. 

The specter of AI has been hovering over the industry ever since the first crude version of ChatGPT. Then came Midjourney, Sora and now Seedance. And while the town has been bracing for impact, the preparation and response by industry leaders has been disparate and at times confusing.

The guilds made AI protections a centerpiece of their negotiations with the studios, networks and streamers. But at the same time, some of the guilds’ most high-profile members like Natasha Lyonne, the Russo brothers and Darren Aronofsky have either built or are experimenting with AI. James Cameron recently joined the board of Stability AI, Ben Affleck just sold his AI company to Netflix for nine figures and last year Disney struck a deal with OpenAI.

Insiders wonder whether the industry is fighting this thing, or just surrendering in bits and pieces. 

But Muirhead and WME have grabbed the reins of an group informally called the “NO FAKES Coalition” that includes CAA, Disney, OpenAI, SAG/AFTRA, the Recording Academy and YouTube among others. They haven’t given up on the old-fashioned way of trying to create protective legislation. 

“If we can’t even enforce consent for use of our clients’ name, image, voice, likeness, then it’s really hard to do the rest of it,” said Hannah Linkenhoker, who joined WME in November as a senior policy & political advisor. Linkenhoker was in DC for the meetings with Muirhead and WME chief legal officer Courtney Braun. “We need a regulatory backbone to build off of,” she said. 

In meetings with legislators, WME stressed their belief that the marketplace should decide much of the policy-making around AI’s relationship with Hollywood, which is a nod to the bill’s detractors who argue it goes too far in regulating the digital space, and that it would stifle AI innovation.

President Trump has pushed the idea of creating a national policy framework around AI, and Blackburn included the NO FAKES Act as part of a draft of a broader federal AI bill that she unveiled yesterday. (Blackburn also recently sent a letter to ByteDance’s CEO Liang Rubo, calling for the company to shut down Seedance.)

The goal is to get the bill through the Senate before the summer, where it would then go to the House. “By the time we get to the fall, they do basically no policymaking between August and November,” Linkenhoker said.

Further complicating matters are the midterms and Blackburn’s gubernatorial run, which could serve as a major distraction from one of the bill’s biggest supporters. “Should Democrats take the House and the Senate in the midterms, that probably bodes well for this getting done next year,” Linkenhoker said. “But I actually think it’s almost better to have it done in a bipartisan way.” 

The breakneck speed at which AI is evolving suggests that time is not on the industry’s side. “This is an issue where policymaking is slow and technology is fast. Congress needs to move fast on this one,” Linkenhoker said.

WME is heading back to DC next month and is bringing A-list reinforcements. The agency is setting up a congressional roundtable with some top clients (they won’t say who) that’s planned for the week of the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25.