Sponsors (58)
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
The bill gives victims stronger federal remedies, injunctions, and deterrents against nonconsensual sexually intimate deepfakes and pushes platforms toward takedown and support practices, but it also creates substantial liability, compliance costs, and risks of overreach that could chill lawful speech and burden small creators and service providers.
Victims of nonconsensual sexually intimate deepfakes (e.g., women, young adults, students, other identifiable individuals) gain a clear federal cause of action with injunctive relief, privacy-protective litigation tools, and statutory remedies—making it easier to stop ongoing harm and obtain compensation.
Federal law explicitly covers AI‑generated deepfakes regardless of labels or disclosures, closing a gap that could otherwise let creators or distributors evade liability.
Recognition of nonconsensual sexually intimate deepfakes as image‑based sexual abuse and the new legal framework is likely to prompt platforms and intermediaries to adopt or strengthen takedown, moderation, and prevention practices, reducing circulation and reputational harm.
Broad definitions and low mens rea standards risk chilling lawful speech, satire, and consensual synthetic creators (impacting creators, artists, tech workers and ordinary users who produce or share synthetic content).
Large statutory damages (and recovery of defendant profits) create risks of severe financial liability that could bankrupt or unduly punish inadvertent or small‑scale creators and individuals.
A federal cause of action with a long (10‑year) discovery tolling period and expanded liability will significantly increase litigation exposure and costs for platforms, hosts, and intermediaries.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Creates a federal cause of action and new definitions to cover non‑consensual AI/synthetic sexually explicit images and allows victims to sue creators, disclosers, and certain possessors/receivers.
Creates a new legal definition for “intimate digital forgery” (non‑consensual AI or synthetic sexually explicit images or videos of an identifiable person) and expands an existing federal civil statute so victims can sue: it authorizes claims against people who knowingly create, possess with intent to disclose, disclose, or solicit and receive such forgeries. The bill treats these deepfake sexual images as a form of image‑based sexual abuse and makes liability available even when a forgery is labeled or presented as inauthentic. The bill revises statutory definitions to expressly cover AI/synthetic sexually explicit imagery, sets out element requirements for new causes of action, adjusts cross‑references in the law, and preserves existing intellectual property law. It also includes a severability clause to keep the rest of the law intact if any part is found unconstitutional.