A 'Human Consent Registry' Lets People Declare How AI May Use Their Likeness

On June 23, standing inside the European Parliament in Brussels, actor Cate Blanchett offered a compact new answer to one of the most bruising questions in artificial intelligence: who decides whether a machine gets to wear your face? Her answer is a website. Alongside Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell, Blanchett unveiled the Human Consent Registry, a free tool that lets anyone create a machine-readable record declaring how AI systems may — or may not — use their name, image, voice, likeness, and movement.

The launch reframes a debate that has largely played out in courtrooms and union bargaining sessions as something closer to a personal utility. "Your identity is your IP in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it," Blanchett said. Consent, in the registry's framing, is not a favor granted to individuals but a default they are owed.

How the registry works

The mechanics are deliberately plain. A user creates an account, supplies biographical details — name, profession, identifying markers — and then sets an "AI use consent" level using a stoplight metaphor. Red means Prohibited. Yellow means Permitted with Terms. Green means Permitted. The system then issues a unique Human Consent ID, a trackable pointer that AI developers can query before folding any part of a person's likeness into training data or generated output.

The choice of a public, machine-readable record is the whole point. Rather than a legal notice buried in a website's terms, the registry aims to be a signal a crawler can read at scale. Its technical foundation is the open Really Simple Licensing (RSL) framework — the "RSL" in RSL Media, the nonprofit Blanchett co-founded this year with chief executive Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds, and Eckart Walther. RSL began as a protocol for digital publishers to broadcast web-scraping permissions to search crawlers and large language models, an attempt to graft a licensing layer onto the open web. The Human Consent Registry extends that logic from publications to people. RSL Media has said it plans to add sister registries for creative "Work," fictional "Characters," and commercial "Marks."

The registry opened to residents of the United States and the European Union, and it is free. It is also, for now, the first public product from a nonprofit that arrived in May with an unusually starry cast of supporters: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Helen Mirren, Javier Bardem, and Emma Thompson have been named among its backers, with director Steven Soderbergh among those speaking publicly on its behalf.

The consent gap it is trying to fill

The registry lands in a governance vacuum that regulators have been slow to fill. The EU passed its AI Act in 2023, with transparency obligations for AI-generated content, and in the United States the proposed NO FAKES Act would create a federal right against unauthorized AI replicas of a person's voice and likeness. But there remains almost no codified, practical way for an ordinary person to state, in a form a machine can act on, how their identity may be used. That is the gap RSL Media is targeting — a declaration layer that could sit underneath whatever laws eventually arrive.

Hexum framed the stakes in rights language rather than technical ones. "Consent is a human right," she said. "A person should be able to say: this is me, this is what I allow, this is what I do not allow, and this is the safe way to reach me if you need to ask." Maydell, appearing as co-host, cast the tool as legislation's practical complement. "The RSL Media Public Registry is an ambitious step to translate these principles into practice — a tool that makes rights transparent, scales trust, and keeps human creativity at the centre of technological progress," she said. "I am glad to see it launch today — as a legislator, and as a human."

The obvious limitation is enforcement, and RSL Media does not hide from it. Nothing legally compels an AI company to check a Human Consent ID or to honor a red light. Compliance is voluntary. The registry's power depends on adoption by the very firms whose scraping prompted it, or on future law that would give its signals teeth. That is where the NO FAKES Act matters: if enacted, it could turn a declared "Prohibited" status from a polite request into evidence of withheld consent, giving the registry a legal spine it currently lacks.

What to watch next

Three things will determine whether the registry becomes infrastructure or a well-meaning artifact. First, adoption by AI developers — whether any major model builder agrees to read RSL consent signals before training, the way some now respect publisher opt-outs. Second, the fate of the NO FAKES Act and parallel EU implementation, which could convert voluntary signals into legally meaningful ones. Third, whether actors' unions and the broader public treat a Human Consent ID as a genuine protection or a symbolic gesture. For now, RSL Media has done the unglamorous work of building a place to say no. The harder question — whether anyone scraping the web is obligated to listen — remains open.