Overview
- The Writers Guild of America East announced the Cloak partnership on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, and will give members free access while offering non-members a $10 option when they register scripts through the guild’s existing service.
- Cloak creates a copy of a file that is designed to look normal to human readers but to be unreadable or resistant to automated AI scraping and training, preserving formatting so writers can still share work with industry contacts.
- The startup says internal tests show Cloak blocks specific models and automated summary tools, naming versions of Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT-6 Astra, but those effectiveness claims are reported by the company and have not been independently verified.
- Cloak was founded in September 2025 and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program and the University of Pennsylvania, and the WGAE frames the tool as part of its AI Task Force strategy to protect writers’ creative labor.
- The guild’s move gives writers a practical way to limit unwanted AI ingestion when sharing material, though experts warn defenses may be contested as models and ingestion methods evolve and contract or legal protections remain a parallel necessity.