Congress Follows the States in Criminalizing Sexual Deepfakes
Key highlights this week:
We’re tracking 1,023 bills in all 50 states related to AI during the 2025 legislative session.
The Texas Senate approved a pared-back version of a comprehensive AI regulatory measure, which is primarily aimed at regulating government use of AI.
All eyes are on the host of AI bills moving through the California legislature before next Friday’s crossover deadline for a bill to pass its chamber of origin.
And Congress has followed the states’ lead in enacting a sexual deepfake bill signed into law by President Trump, which is the topic of this week’s deep dive.
Last week, Google upped the generative AI game by releasing Veo 3, a model that creates short (8-second) videos with sounds based on your prompt. The key addition here is adding voice to the video, which spurred a round of viral creativity of social media users (see, e.g., Prompt Theory). As image, video, and voice generation technology progresses, more emphasis will be placed on potential abuses, namely deepfakes. State lawmakers have already responded by enacting over 100 laws related to deepfakes — by far the most popular AI-related regulation across the country. And this month, Congress joined the party when President Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act into federal law.
Of the 116 laws enacted at the state level related to deepfakes, these mostly divide up into three main buckets: sexual deepfakes, political deepfakes, and fraud. The TAKE IT DOWN Act (US S. 146), signed into law by President Trump on May 19, 2025, falls into the sexual deepfake category. The law, which stands for “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,” has two primary purposes: (1) criminalizing the publication of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes and (2) requiring online platforms to establish a notice and takedown process when a nonconsensual sexual deepfake is reported.
