Verified September 10, 2026
The US Synthetic Media Law Atlas
Every state law on deepfakes and synthetic media: elections, intimate imagery, likeness and voice, read from the statutes.
Which states have deepfake laws?
As of September 10, 2026, this atlas records 13 enacted laws across 8 states in three categories: 4 on disclosure, 6 on civil and criminal law against nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, 2 on voice and likeness rights against ai replication: tennessee's elvis act and california's digital replica laws are the models.. Every record links the official statute and carries its verification date.
01 Elections
4 laws: disclosure, labeling or bans on ai fakes aimed at voters, usually inside a window before election day.
Disclosure, labeling or bans on AI fakes aimed at voters, usually inside a window before election day.
02 Intimate imagery
6 laws: civil and criminal law against nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, the category nearly every state has now reached.
Civil and criminal law against nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, the category nearly every state has now reached.
03 Likeness and voice
2 laws: voice and likeness rights against ai replication
Voice and likeness rights against AI replication: Tennessee's ELVIS Act and California's digital replica laws are the models.
04 Federal
The federal layer
- S. 146, TAKE IT DOWN Act, Public Law 119-12 (2025): Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act
Criminalizes the knowing publication of nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, including AI-generated digital forgeries, and requires covered platforms to remove reported depictions and known copies as soon as possible and not later than 48 hours after a valid request; approved May 19, 2025.
2025. Verified September 10, 2026.
05 The states
State by state
06 Method
How the atlas is built
Candidates were collected from legislative trackers and then each verified against the official statute: the state legislature's own bill or code page. A law with no reachable official text is not in the atlas. One record per state per category; where a state has several laws on one shelf, the strongest recent one is listed and the note names the earlier.
Scope, stated plainly: enacted law specifically on deepfakes and synthetic media. General AI laws live in the 50-State AI Law Atlas; the machine-readable marking duties (EU Article 50, California SB 942) live in the AI Content Labeling Checker. A state missing here is a state where nothing could be verified, which is not proof of nothing.
07 Data
Download and cite
One file, free under CC BY 4.0: laws.json.
Cite as: GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education), "US Synthetic Media Law Atlas", verified 2026-09-10, https://www.gage.academy/tools/us-synthetic-media-atlas. Reuse under CC BY 4.0.
Questions
- Which states have deepfake laws?
- As of September 10, 2026, this atlas records 13 enacted laws across 8 states in three categories: 4 on disclosure, 6 on civil and criminal law against nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, 2 on voice and likeness rights against ai replication: tennessee's elvis act and california's digital replica laws are the models.. Every record links the official statute and carries its verification date.
- Is there a federal deepfake law?
- Yes: S. 146, TAKE IT DOWN Act, Public Law 119-12 (2025), Criminalizes the knowing publication of nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, including AI-generated digital forgeries, and requires covered platforms to remove reported depictions and known copies as soon as possible and not later than 48 hours after a valid request; approved May 19, 2025.. Below it, the states have built three distinct shelves: election protection, intimate imagery, and likeness and voice rights.
- Do these laws require labeling AI content?
- The election shelf mostly does: disclosure or labeling duties inside a pre-election window. The intimate shelf is mostly prohibitions and takedown duties rather than labels. For the machine-readable marking duties that sit above all of this, the instrument is the AI Content Labeling Checker, which maps EU AI Act Article 50 and California's SB 942.
GAGE briefings tell you which AI regulation deadlines are coming, what they actually require of you, and when a program opens.