74designer wrote: “My old system is Sierra with AI2019. I have never had this message come up before. It also came up in After Effects 2020.
Is this something new with 2020 Adobe versions?”
It’s something new to macOS 10.15 Catalina, that’s why you haven’t seen it on your Sierra Mac. And it isn’t about covert surveillance. As part of tightened anti-hacking security restrictions, Catalina added many more alerts for things applications do that may or may not be actual security issues. “Screen recording” apparently covers a range of potential macOS screen interactions that applications might require to do things like use a color sampler tool, even if they never actually capture a screen recording to a file. If you do a web search on “mac app wants permission to record the screen”, many of the search results are other companies explaining why their application now triggers that alert in Catalina.
Below is a link to a similar post in the Adobe After Effects community, with an answer from Adobe staff about that program:
After Effects asking to record screen