Vox Media union ratifies contract with AI job-security and disclosure protections

Members of the Writers Guild of America East at Vox Media ratified a new three-year contract covering staff at Vox.com, The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Thrillist, The Dodo and other titles under the company’s umbrella. The roughly 250-member bargaining unit had voted 90% in favour of authorising a strike as the previous contract’s expiry approached, and management reached a tentative deal on the eve of that deadline.

The contract’s AI provisions were among the most detailed negotiated by a US media union to that point. It barred layoffs made solely because of the use of generative AI, required that any AI-generated material go through the same editorial review as human-written work, and mandated that such use be publicly disclosed. Employees were given the right to decline a byline or credit on content where AI tools had been used, and the agreement included advance-notice requirements before management could roll out new AI tools or systems expected to meaningfully affect employees’ work, plus protections against the use of employees’ digital likenesses.

The deal followed a 2023 organising campaign, “Journalists, Not Robots,” in which WGA East members across several newsrooms had petitioned publishers for AI safeguards. It became a template cited by other media unions negotiating similar protections, part of a broader pattern in 2025 of labour agreements treating generative AI as a bargainable job-security issue rather than a purely technical or editorial matter.