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If I asked you what Hollywood's biggest actors are getting paid to do in 2026, you'd probably guess movies. I recently had a chat with Zac Efron backstage at an Andrea Bocelli performance, and he gave me his first hand experience of the actual answer…
Increasingly, the more accurate answer is: stand still inside a two-story orb of cameras and lights while a company scans every inch of their face, body, and voice into a file that can go to work without them.
Say hello to the CAA Vault, a literal studio in Burbank where one of the three biggest talent agencies in the world captures its clients' digital likenesses and stores them, in partnership with the AI firm Veritone, inside something called a Digital Media Hub.
The vault is already huge.
CAA's head of strategic development, Alexandra Shannon, put it plainly: the agency is capturing "terabytes of data for every single client." The pitch to talent isn't "let us protect you from AI." It's "let us get there first." Shannon's logic: the law hasn't caught up to AI likeness theft, so the fastest way to build real protection is for the client to own and register their own digital replica before anyone else's unauthorized version exists.
Once that owned version is on file, she argues, it becomes much easier to prove infringement when someone else's knockoff shows up.
For a century, an actor's face and voice were things a studio used and a lawyer defended after the fact. CAA is repositioning them as an asset the client owns outright, one that can now generate licensing revenue on its own, in ads, dubbing, games, whatever a client says yes to, without the actor needing to physically show up.
Every major agency is solving this differently, which tells you nobody’s sure yet.
WME looked at the same problem and went the opposite direction. Rather than build its own vault, WME partnered with Vermillio, a company whose Trace ID tech tracks not just full likeness use but "contributory data," meaning cases where a client's face, voice, or mannerisms make up a percentage of some AI-generated composite that isn't an exact copy of them.
WME's own leadership told TheWrap "We're not a technology company. We're not trying to be a technology company." Their bet is that talent should get paid even for the AI version of themselves that's only 20% them.
The alternative to all of this is Tilly Norwood, and Hollywood had something to say.
Tilly Norwood is a fully synthetic "actress," built by a company called Xicoia, trained on the work of real performers with no consent and no compensation attached. When word got out that talent agencies were considering repping her, SAG-AFTRA condemned it outright, stating she "is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program," and warned producers that casting her could breach their existing contracts. Emily Blunt, Melissa Barrera, and others piled on publicly.
The backlash wasn't really about the technology. It was about consent. A vault where the actor owns the scan and sets the terms is a fundamentally different product than a synthetic performer built from scraped footage with nobody's permission. Same underlying tech, opposite outcome, depending entirely on who's holding the file.
There is already legal structure in place.
SAG-AFTRA's 2023 contract, ratified by 78% of the union, already requires clear written consent, a description of intended use, and separate minimum compensation before a studio can create or reuse a digital replica of a performer. Reuse on a new project requires new consent and new pay. That's the baseline every vault deal sits on.
And some individuals aren't waiting on their agency at all. Matthew McConaughey's team quietly secured eight trademarks this year covering his voice, his image, even footage of him just staring into a camera, including a literal sound mark on "alright, alright, alright."
His attorney's reasoning was simple: a trademark gives you a federal court remedy that copyright and likeness law don't cleanly offer yet. In the same breath, McConaughey is an investor in ElevenLabs and used their tech to license out a Spanish-language version of his own voice for his newsletter.
I've said before that the two things that survive every version of the AI economy are ownership and being irreplaceably real. Hollywood is building a solution: scan yourself, own the file, license it on your own terms, and let the law defend the original instead of chasing down the fake.
It won't stay confined to actors. Anyone with a public identity, a voice, a face people recognize, an audience that trusts them, is looking at the same decision actors are making right now. Scan yourself and own the terms, or let someone else's version of you get built first.
Hit reply and tell me: if you could license one thing about yourself right now, your voice, your face, your name, would you? I read every single response.
Jenny
P.S. If you run a business with any public-facing spokesperson, employee, or founder story, this vault question is coming for you faster than you think. Worth a conversation before someone else has the idea first.
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