A bipartisan group of members of Congress have recently reintroduced the  “Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2026” (NO FAKES Act), a bill to create a federal intellectual property (IP) right to allow a person to control duplication of their voice and image.

The sponsors of the bill were Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chris Coons (D-DE), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Representatives Maria Salazar (R-FL), Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Nathaniel Moran (R-TX), Becca Balint (D-VT) and Laurel Lee (R-FL).

According to Rep. Salazar, the Act is intended “to protect Americans’ voice and visual likeness from the growing threat of unauthorized digital replicas created without their consent through artificial intelligence.”

She noted that

As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, unauthorized digital replicas, manipulated videos, voice cloning, and deceptive deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated and more difficult to detect. The NO FAKES Act would create clear federal guardrails to protect Americans from exploitation, fraud, and digital impersonation while preserving innovation, responsible AI development, and First Amendment protections.

According to Salazar’s summary, The NO FAKES Act would:

• Recognize that every individual has a federal intellectual property right to their own voice and likeness, including extending protections to families after death.
• Empower individuals to take action against bad actors who knowingly create, distribute, or profit from unauthorized digital replicas.
• Protect responsible online platforms from liability when they remove offending content after discovering unlawful material.
• Strengthen protections against harmful deepfakes, deceptive impersonation, exploitation, and unauthorized digital replication.
• Preserve innovation, legitimate research, free speech rights, and other recognized First Amendment protections.

Her press release added that

The revised legislation also includes additional safeguards, including a counter-notice process to better protect free speech rights, exemptions for libraries, archives, and research institutions, and technical improvements to ensure the bill functions as intended across digital platforms.

A discussion version of the bill was first introduced in 2023.

In 2024, witness Tahliah Debrett Barnett (“FKA twigs”) told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property that she’d found songs supposedly by her online (and presumably created using AI) that she didn’t really create or perform.

However,  Ben Sheffner, Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Law and Policy at the Motion Picture Association, Inc., said Congress needed to avoid infringing First Amendment rights by prohibiting films like Forrest Gump, in which digital recreations of real historic figures appear.

We wrote about the NO FAKES Act in this blog back in 2024. As we noted then,

Some existing state and federal laws address the issue, but there are gaps in coverage, as the Copyright Office Report notes:

State laws are both inconsistent and insufficient in various respects. As described above, some states currently do not provide rights of publicity and privacy, while others only protect certain categories of individuals. Multiple states require a showing that the individual’s identity has commercial value. Not all states’ laws protect an individual’s voice; those that do may limit protection to distinct and well-known voices, to voices with commercial value, or to use of actual voices without consent (rather than a digital replica).

When the Senate bill was first introduced, OpenAI, The Walt Disney Company, Warner Music Group, the Authors Guild, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), Universal Music Group, and SAG-AFTRA (the actor’s union) were among the entities that supported it.

According to the RIAA,  92% of Americans  surveyed agreed that “stricter laws are needed to prevent AI from using someone’s body, face, or voice without consent (deepfakes).”

In addition to the issue of directly copying someone’s voice or face, there’s also the subtler issue of copying someone’s “style,” as we discussed in this 2025 blog.

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