No single US deepfake law exists. What applies depends on your state and what the fake does:
- Tennessee: the ELVIS Act (effective July 2024) added voice to protected personal rights, aimed at AI replicas. - California: a 2024 package: AB 2655 (platform duties on election deepfakes), AB 2839 (ban on deceptive election content), AB 2355 (labels on AI political ads). - Texas: since 2019, creating or publishing a deceptive deepfake video to influence an election is a misdemeanor within 30 days of voting. - Virginia: among the first states (2019) to criminalize nonconsensual deepfake pornography. - Federal: the TAKE IT DOWN Act (May 2025) criminalizes nonconsensual intimate imagery including AI forgeries nationwide, with 48-hour platform takedowns. Sources: Congress.gov, NCSL The practical rule: intimate imagery is now a federal crime, elections are a state-by-state minefield, and commercial impersonation runs through right-of-publicity law.
An AI compliance monitor tracks which deepfake and AI disclosure rules apply to your product as laws change state by state.