The vote that would hand every American a property right in their own face did not happen in August. It happened on 18 June 2026, in a Senate Judiciary Committee markup that ended in a voice vote — no roll call, no recorded dissent, and three Republicans on the record with objections they declined to turn into votes.
Two months later, that is still the high-water mark. The NO FAKES Act of 2026 sits on the Senate calendar with no floor time scheduled, its House companion parked in committee, and the coalitions on both sides spending the summer arguing over a mechanism most people have never read.
S. 4591 — the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, sponsored by Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) — would create something federal law has never had: a digital replication right. Every individual would own a transferable, licensable property interest in their own voice and visual likeness, enforceable in civil court against anyone who produces or distributes an unauthorised AI-generated replica. The right does not die with the person. It passes to heirs and executors and can run as long as 70 years past death, though it cannot be assigned outright during a person's lifetime — a deliberate guard against studios and labels demanding a signature-over as a condition of employment.
The enforcement architecture is where the fight actually is. The bill imports the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's basic shape: a notice-and-takedown pathway, a safe harbour for platforms that comply, and statutory damages for those that do not. On receiving a valid notice, an online service must remove or disable the material as soon as is technologically and practically feasible. The May 2026 rewrite added a DMCA-style counter-notification process, letting the user who uploaded the material contest removal and seek restoration — a change the sponsors made specifically to answer speech critics — along with penalties for filing false or deceptive notices in either direction.
The numbers attached are large. Individuals face statutory damages of 5,000 dollars per work containing an unauthorised replica. Platforms face 25,000 dollars per work where they are judged to have acted in good faith, rising to as much as 750,000 dollars per work where they are not. The bill also preempts future state digital-replica laws while preserving those already on the books, and carves out parody, satire, commentary, news reporting and documentary use.
Both sides, at full strength
The support is unusually broad and unusually strange. SAG-AFTRA delivered an open letter with more than 16,000 signatures. The RIAA called it a consensus bill built through a bipartisan, bicameral process and backed by, in its telling, American AI developers, the creative community, child safety groups, conservative groups, labour unions and free speech advocates. IBM, OpenAI and YouTube are all supportive — an alignment that would have been unthinkable on any copyright-adjacent bill five years ago.
The sponsors have kept the framing off Hollywood and on ordinary people. Blackburn: AI should empower innovation, not give scammers and online predators a free pass to exploit someone's voice and visual likeness without permission. Coons put it more plainly: everyone deserves the right to own and protect their voice and likeness from AI deepfakes, no matter if you are Taylor Swift or an 8th grader in Wilmington.
The opposition is a coalition that rarely agrees on anything: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the ACLU, Fight for the Future, FIRE, the Organization for Transformative Works, the R Street Institute and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Their objection is not that deepfakes are harmless. It is that a takedown regime backed by 750,000-dollar exposure will not produce careful judgement — it will produce reflexive deletion. EFF's argument is that the bill offers platforms no protection for correctly identifying something as satire, parody, commentary or news, so a service facing a heckler's veto over lawful speech has every incentive to remove first and ask questions later. The Computer and Communications Industry Association has run the arithmetic from the platform side: because damages accrue per work, a single service could face more than a billion dollars in statutory liability from roughly 1,300 covered uploads.
Analysis
The unanimous voice vote is worth less than it looks. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Eric Schmitt all voted the bill out while saying it was not ready. Lee warned that the legislation as drafted raises potentially significant concerns regarding free speech, and that in protecting content creators' rights Congress should not inadvertently chill speech or undermine long-standing First Amendment principles. Cruz was more concrete, citing Spencer Pratt's Los Angeles mayoral campaign and its AI-generated attack ads featuring Mayor Karen Bass. He thought the videos were hysterical, and a good example of what should be protected and not fall within a bill like this.
That is a committee telling its sponsors, in advance, where the amendments will come from.
The deeper structural question is whether the carve-outs work as written. Parody and news exemptions are affirmative defences — they protect you in court, not at the moment a platform's automated system processes a notice. Whether the new counter-notice provision genuinely closes that gap, or merely restores content days after the moment it mattered, is the fight the Senate has deferred rather than resolved.
Watch three things this autumn: whether Senate leadership finds floor time before the calendar collapses; whether House Judiciary moves H.R. 8915, which has sat since 20 May; and whether Lee, Cruz or Schmitt convert their markup objections into filed amendments. If a manager's amendment appears narrowing platform liability or hardening the satire carve-out, the bill passes. If it does not, the digital replication right stays what it has been for three years running — the most broadly supported AI bill in Congress that never quite reaches a vote.
“Everyone deserves the right to own and protect their voice and likeness from AI deepfakes, no matter if you are Taylor Swift or an 8th grader in Wilmington.”— Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., lead Democratic sponsor