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Support the federal NCII takedown law's criminal core, but add the counter-notice safeguard it currently lacks to protect legitimate speech.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 12, 2026
Cited Sources
8
What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The general, non-election version of the deepfake problem — non-consensual intimate imagery, voice-cloning fraud, and commercial impersonation — now has federal criminal law behind it. It passed about as close to unanimously as anything gets through Congress: 409-2 in the House, unanimous in the Senate, co-authored by Sen. Cruz (R) and Sen. Klobuchar (D). That law took effect in 2025, with platform takedown obligations enforceable since May 2026, and enforcement has started, including a first criminal conviction.
One piece was left unbuilt. The law's takedown mechanism has no counter-notice process and no explicit carve-out for newsworthy content, satire, or art. A 48-hour compliance clock with no safeguard against bad-faith takedown requests creates a documented risk to legitimate speech.
Support the law's criminal NCII provisions as already appropriately targeted, but add a short, expedited counter-notice and anti-abuse mechanism plus an explicit newsworthy/public-interest carve-out to its platform takedown requirement.
Support passage of the pending federal civil right-of-action bill for NCII victims as a complement to criminal enforcement. It doesn't touch Section 230, so it doesn't raise the platform-liability concerns a broader proposal would.
Strengthen state Attorneys General authority and multi-state coordination for NCII/"nudify app" enforcement specifically. This is where most enforcement against that ecosystem has come from so far. Federal policy should reinforce that capacity.
Support financial-institution verification-protocol requirements — out-of-band confirmation for high-value wire transfers — as a practical mitigation for voice-cloning fraud specifically, matching the vulnerability shown in the highest-profile documented case.
Support continued adoption of the same content-provenance standard AI-01 and AI-13 already reference, while being explicit about its two structural limits: most platforms strip the credential on re-encoding, and it doesn't survive an open-weight model with the embedding deliberately stripped.
Support the federal NCII takedown law's criminal core, but add the counter-notice safeguard it currently lacks to protect legitimate speech.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
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