Sponsors (66)
The bill gives identifiable victims stronger federal remedies, takedown tools, and potential access to services—providing significant protections—while raising risks of chilling lawful speech, heavy litigation and compliance costs, and operational burdens for small creators and platforms.
Identifiable victims (including women, young adults, students) gain a clear federal remedy: they can sue, seek injunctions to remove or block display of nonconsensual sexually intimate deepfakes, and litigate with court-ordered privacy protections (pseudonyms, sealed filings, redactions).
Federal coverage of AI‑generated synthetic sexual imagery (regardless of labels/disclosures) closes a legal loophole that can shelter bad actors and creates a stronger basis for platforms, courts, and law enforcement to treat deepfakes as actionable abuse.
Platforms and hosts are more likely to implement takedown, moderation, and prevention practices, reducing circulation of harmful deepfakes and protecting reputations and safety for students and young adults.
Broad definitions and relatively low mens rea standards (knowledge or reckless disregard) risk chilling lawful expression — including satire, consensual synthetic creators, artists, and researchers — because creators may fear liability.
Large statutory damages, potential award of defendant profits, and extended discovery tolling (up to 10 years) create substantial litigation exposure and potential ruinous financial costs for defendants, especially inadvertent or small‑scale creators and individual distributors.
Compliance requirements and enforcement expectations (detection, takedown, possible deletion orders) could impose heavy operational and cost burdens on small platforms, nonprofits, and service providers, disadvantaging smaller operators.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Creates a new legal category for non‑consensual AI sexual images and expands civil suits against creators, possessors with intent to disclose, and distributors.
Official title: To improve rights to relief for individuals affected by non-consensual activities involving intimate digital forgeries, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 21, 2025 by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez · Last progress May 21, 2025
Creates a new statutory category for non‑consensual synthetic sexually intimate images and videos (intimate digital forgeries) and expands an existing civil cause of action so people who are depicted in such deepfakes can sue creators, possessors with intent to disclose, and distributors. The bill revises definitions to expressly cover AI‑generated and computer‑manipulated sexual imagery that falsely represents an identifiable person and remains actionable even if labeled or disclosed as synthetic. Sets out who may sue and for what conduct, updates statutory definitions for "identifiable individual" and "intimate digital forgery," preserves the rest of the law if parts are struck down, and clarifies the law does not change intellectual property rules.