The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to give every American a property right in their own face and voice. The same vote handed anyone who holds that right a fast, cheap way to make online content disappear.
That happened when the committee advanced the NO FAKES Act of 2026 on a voice vote and sent it to the full Senate. This a federal system for deleting speech on request, backed by fines large enough that platforms will delete first and ask questions never.
A “right holder” tells a platform that some video, image, or audio clip is an “unauthorized digital replica” of a real person, and the platform is left with two options.
It can pull the content fast, or it can gamble on a fine of up to $750,000 per work if a court later rules the replica was unauthorized. For a company fielding millions of uploads a day, the math isn’t close, so the content comes down.
Pulling a clip once isn’t the end of the platform’s obligation. After it processes a single notice, the bill requires it to block every future upload that matches the same “digital fingerprint,” a cryptographic hash of the flagged file.
The platform has to keep deleting, automatically, with no person checking why. A clip tagged as an unauthorized replica stays dead even when the next person posting it has a solid defense. The bill insists it imposes no duty to monitor. Screening every upload against a stored hash is that duty, whatever the bill calls it.
The defenses do exist, at least on paper. News, sports, documentary, biography, commentary, criticism, scholarship, satire, and parody all get written exemptions. The catch, though, is timing. A takedown lands before anyone weighs whether your clip qualifies as any of them, so you get your speech back only by fighting for it, and the bill prices that fight on purpose.
Contesting a takedown means filing a counter-notification and the bill spells out what that costs you. The document has to carry “a physical signature, witnessed or attested to in person by a licensed notary public.” You also agree to be sued in federal court and to accept service of process.
Anonymous speech has carried First Amendment protection since the Founders passed around unsigned pamphlets. This bill doesn’t repeal that protection but it makes you walk into a notary’s office and put your real name on the record before you can argue your post was lawful.
Then there’s Section (f), the part that turns a takedown into an unmasking. A right holder can ask a court clerk, not a judge, to issue a subpoena identifying whoever posted the flagged material. The clerk “shall expeditiously issue and sign” it once the paperwork is in order.
No judge weighs whether the underlying claim holds up and no hearing happens. Send the notice, file the form, and the platform has to hand over whatever it knows about who you are. The accusation alone pries your identity loose.
Labeling the work honestly gives you nothing either. The bill says it “shall not be a defense” that you marked the content as AI-generated or flagged it as unauthorized. Admitting the fakery up front buys no cover.
The power to send these notices reaches well past the person depicted. A right holder includes heirs, executors, licensees, and the record labels that hold exclusive contracts with an artist.
The right survives death, passes to your estate, and runs as long as 70 years after you’re gone. An estate, or a label, gets most of a century of control over how a dead performer’s voice and face may be shown. The takedown notice becomes an inheritance.
The committee passed the bill without a single no vote and several members made clear they weren’t comfortable. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Eric Schmitt flagged First Amendment problems and voted yes regardless.
“The legislation as drafted now raises some potentially significant concerns regarding free speech,” Lee said. “We do need to ensure that in protecting content creators’ rights, we don’t inadvertently chill free speech or undermine long-standing First Amendment principles.”
Cruz reached for a concrete example, pointing to Spencer Pratt’s recent run for mayor of Los Angeles, where the reality star ran attack ads built on AI-generated images of Mayor Karen Bass.
Cruz said he wanted to protect “satire, which is an important part of speech,” and described Pratt’s videos as “hysterical, and I think are a good example of what should be protected and not fall within a bill like this.” Voting for the bill while naming the speech it threatens is a strange way to defend that speech.
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who led a bipartisan group of fifteen, framed the bill as overdue.
“I’ve always said that America needs one set of rules for AI, and NO FAKES is a critical component of that rulebook,” Blackburn said. The bill borrows from Tennessee’s 2024 ELVIS Act, which built a similar voice-and-likeness right with a provision protecting record labels’ contracts.
SAG-AFTRA gathered more than 16,000 signatures for it. The RIAA, the Motion Picture Association, OpenAI, and Google-owned YouTube lined up behind it too.
The Trump administration signaled approval in a March policy document on AI that recommended this exact kind of likeness protection. When the entertainment lobby, the AI companies, and the White House all want the same takedown regime, the people most likely to get silenced are the ones with no lobbyist in the room.
The bill now heads to the Senate floor with the coalition intact and the unmasking subpoena, the notarized counter-notice, and the automatic fingerprint blocking still in the text. The floor can strip those out. Until it does, the system deletes on accusation and charges you for the right to speak again.
