Artificial Intelligence

Discuss, Evaluate, and Bargain Over

An empty corporate meeting room at dusk: a long bare table with a dense row of office chairs crowded along one side, a single chair alone opposite, and faint pale rings on the carpet where chairs have been removed.

In August 2025 the quality assurance workers at Raven Software ratified a first contract with Microsoft after nearly three years of bargaining — nineteen members by then. A guaranteed 10% raise over two years, seven days’ notice before mandatory overtime, limits on back-to-back overtime weeks, severance and recall rights (CWA; Game Developer). Artificial intelligence is not in it anywhere. Not restricted, not permitted, not mentioned.

In September 2026 nearly 1,900 workers across seven Blizzard units ratified theirs, after two years. Wage increases, just cause, a grievance procedure, four extra weeks of severance regardless of tenure, and the right to be recalled into open positions across any Blizzard unit for fourteen months, which the union calls an industry first. And this: “the contracts now require Blizzard to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the usage of artificial intelligence” (CWA).

That is the furthest any organised workforce in American video games has got on the subject. Read it slowly. It requires a conversation.

What does the sentence actually require?

Three verbs. Discuss, evaluate, bargain over. None of them is limit. None is consent. None is not without. What it does is move the use of these systems out of the set of things an employer simply does and into the set of things an employer must raise first — a mandatory subject rather than a management prerogative. A real change in procedure and none at all in outcome. An employer who discusses, evaluates and bargains in good faith and then proceeds has complied.

Now the third unit. The quality assurance testers at Activision Publishing were certified in March 2024 as what CWA called the largest certified union in the US video game industry — approximately 600 members across California, Texas and Minnesota (CWA). Bargaining opened that August. There is still no contract. On 15 October they voted to authorise a strike, the day before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 shipped, and CWA named four things the company has failed to bargain in good faith over: wages, guardrails on AI usage, its usage of contractors, and accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (CWA, 15 October).

“Guardrails” is the union’s word and a hopeful one. It has no counterpart in any signed document in this corporate family. The nearest thing that exists is the Blizzard sentence, and the Blizzard sentence is a meeting.

Is that nothing?

No, and the easy version of this piece treats a procedural win as a betrayal, which is wrong. Microsoft’s gaming division announced 3,200 planned reductions in July; fourteen months of recall rights is the difference between a redundancy and a queue, and it is a serious thing to have taken off an employer. Nor is a duty to bargain decoration — it turns a decision into a negotiation, and a negotiation leaves a record. Quality assurance is the part of making a game hardest to describe as authorship and easiest to describe as a cost, which is precisely the position from which being owed a conversation is an improvement.

So the complaint is not that the Blizzard language is a fraud. It is that this is what two years and 1,900 people buys, and that the number of signed sentences in this industry saying no to anything on the subject appears to be zero.

What does waiting cost, and to whom?

Kotaku reports that the Activision QA unit, roughly 600 at certification, is now just over 400. Emily Danko, on the bargaining committee, says it has been losing people steadily since the return-to-office process began two years ago. In September the company offered voluntary severance and a former union steward took it (Aftermath).

None of that is misconduct. Attrition is lawful, a return-to-office policy is lawful, and voluntary severance is voluntary. Offering to meet again on 21 and 22 October, which Activision has done, is the opposite of refusing to meet; a spokesperson says the company has been working in good faith, has made meaningful progress, and has plans in place so that players and upcoming releases are not disrupted.

But a sentence about artificial intelligence is the one sentence in a labour contract whose worth depends on the date it is signed, because the thing it governs is arriving on its own schedule and is not waiting for the signature. Every month it goes unwritten, the practice it would have covered is being established as simply how the work is done — and the group with standing to write it is smaller than the month before. Those are not two difficulties. They are one clock read from either end, and only one party is charged for the time.

A first contract is a trade’s first description of itself in writing. Raven’s, in 2025, describes a workplace of overtime and layoffs with no machines in it at all. Blizzard’s, in 2026, describes one where the machines are a topic. The third description does not exist, and the workforce it would describe is leaving faster than it is being drafted. When it arrives it will be accurate about something that has already changed shape — the ordinary fate of any document written slowly about a fast subject. What is not ordinary is that everyone can watch it happening, and the delay is free to exactly one of them.

I have read none of these contracts; what is public is each union’s own summary, which is a party’s description of a document and not the document. What I’d watch for is whether the Activision sentence, when it exists, says more than Blizzard’s or less. My guess is less.

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