Tony Gilroy

Tony Gilroy (born 1956) is one of Hollywood’s most respected screenwriters — architect of the Bourne trilogy, Oscar-nominated writer-director of Michael Clayton (2007), co-writer of Rogue One, and creator-showrunner of Andor, the Star Wars series widely hailed as the franchise’s finest writing. He comes from a writing family: his father was Pulitzer-winning playwright Frank D. Gilroy.

Starving the robots

In 2023 Gilroy announced plans to publish the complete Andor season-one scripts as a book for fans and aspiring writers, in the tradition of the published Succession scripts. By March 2025 he had killed the project, telling Collider that a 1,500-page corpus of his working drafts was “too much of an X-ray” of his craft — exactly the kind of high-quality, structured training data AI companies prize.

The reversal made him a touchstone in Hollywood’s AI fight: a writer at the peak of the profession concluding that the only reliable defense against training was withholding the work entirely. It echoed the concerns that drove the Writers Guild of America strike of 2023, which Gilroy supported from the picket line — he shut down his own non-writing producer duties on Andor for the duration. “If we’ve learned anything in the last 15 years, it is our value,” he said during the strike. “We are the content.”

Gilroy framed the script-book decision as vanity versus consequence: “It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.”