Eight States Have a Digital Replica Law, and All Eight Were Written for a Business

"Digital replica law" is one phrase wrapped around four different instruments. A personal right you can sue on. A contract rule that voids a clause you already signed. An estate right your executors hold after you die. A disclosure duty on advertisers that gives you nothing to sue on at all. Which of the four your state passed matters more than whether your state is on the list.

None of what follows is legal advice, and none of it replaces a lawyer in your state. Statutes get amended, and two of the laws in this table were amended within twelve months of passing.

Three rows decide whether any of this is real for a person nobody has heard of.

Tennessee is the only entry built from the start around voice cloning and plainly covering everybody. Its definition of voice is "any sound that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice of the individual". That sentence is why the ELVIS Act keeps getting quoted. Tennessee also went after the supply side, creating liability for distributing an algorithm, tool or service whose primary purpose is producing unauthorised replicas, which no other state had tried first.

California's pair get reported as a single law, which muddles both. AB 2602 is a contract law for living people. AB 1836 is an estates law for dead ones, defining a digital replica as "a computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual" embodied in a recording or audiovisual work the person never made. AB 1836 carries a floor of $10,000 or actual damages, whichever is greater.

Montana is the most interesting recent law for anyone who has never sold anything, because the right attaches "whether or not an individual commercially benefits during their lifetime". It descends to your executors and heirs for ten years after death, and terminates twenty years after death if nobody has taken legal action to transfer or licence the right. It applies only if you are a Montana resident, or were domiciled there when you died.

If your state was not in that table, you are in the majority. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have no statute using the words digital replica.

Not the same as nothing. Most states recognise a right of publicity, by statute or through case law, and a right of publicity can sometimes stretch far enough to cover a synthetic voice used to sell something. Roughly half the states carry a publicity statute and several more recognise the right through their courts, per Justia's overview of publicity rights under state laws. A small group, commonly listed as Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota and Wyoming, has never clearly established one either way, which leaves a person there arguing defamation, fraud or unfair competition instead.

The difference is who has to do the stretching. In Tennessee you point at a statute saying voice includes a simulation. In a state running on general publicity case law, you have to persuade a judge that a synthetic voice is your identity, that the use was commercial, and that you were identifiable. That argument runs slower, costs more, and most people never bring one at all.

Eight is a verified minimum rather than a ceiling, because state sessions add likeness bills continuously. Check the review date at the foot of this page before you rely on the count.

For the wider frame, who controls your identity after you die sets out the four separate parties who end up holding a piece of your face and voice. This page is the legal layer underneath that question.

Read the fourth column again and the same words keep returning: commercial, advertising, solicitation, sound recording, audiovisual work. Every one of those is a business context.

Right of publicity law grew out of celebrity endorsement disputes. It was built to stop a company putting a famous face on a cereal box. Bolt AI onto that frame and you get protection against a company cloning your voice for an advert. You do not get protection against the two things ordinary people are actually frightened of, which are a fake of you saying something you never said, and a fake of you turned on someone you love.

The exceptions are narrow. Tennessee attaches a misdemeanour offence and Utah a class B misdemeanour for abusive identity use in advertising, so both reach some conduct without anyone filing a lawsuit. New York's synthetic performer disclosure rule, in force since 9 June 2026, is a transparency duty rather than a personal claim, and it carries no private right of action, so there is nothing there for you to sue on either.

The same split between transparency and ownership runs through European law. What Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires from 2 August 2026 is a marking and disclosure duty, not a rule about who is allowed to copy your voice.

Every state digital replica law in the United States guards your voice as a commercial asset. Not one of them guards your voice as your voice.

Two federal instruments and your state's criminal code do more for an ordinary person than most of the publicity statutes above.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act (S.146, 119th Congress) was signed on 19 May 2025 and is law. It criminalises the non-consensual publication of intimate images including digital forgeries, and it requires covered platforms to remove a flagged image within 48 hours of a valid notice. Platforms had until 19 May 2026 to build the notice-and-removal process, so the machinery is live now. This is the one federal law that gives an ordinary person a route not starting with hiring anybody, and the Congressional Research Service has a plain summary at LSB11314.

The FCC's Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17 of 8 February 2024 confirmed that AI-generated voices count as "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. A cloned voice used in an outbound robocall without prior express consent is therefore unlawful under the TCPA, and the TCPA has a private right of action with statutory damages per call. If a clone of you turns up on a phone line, that ruling is the lever.

Beyond those, most states have a criminal impersonation, harassment, wire fraud or electronic communications offence that a cloned voice can fall under. These are prosecutor-driven rather than something you file yourself, which is the reason a police report is worth making rather than skipping.

Go back to the call your mother answered. Nothing in the table above touches that call. Fraud law does, and the phone rules do, and that ordering is the whole shape of American replica law: the newest statutes protect the version of you that appears in an advert, and the oldest law in the book protects the version of you that asks a parent for money.

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The NO FAKES Act of 2026 (S. 4591, 119th Congress) advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a unanimous voice vote on 18 June 2026. As at July 2026 it has not passed the Senate and it is not law.

Enacted in its current form, it would create the first federal right over a person's voice and visual likeness, covering all individuals rather than only performers, with a notice-and-takedown process and liability for online services that host unauthorised replicas knowing the depicted person did not consent. Post-mortem, the right as drafted runs ten years from death and is renewable in further increments up to a maximum of seventy years, conditional on registration and demonstrated active public use of the voice or likeness. Statutory damages in the Senate drafts run from $5,000 to $25,000 per work, or actual damages and profits, whichever is greater.

For a page about state law, the preemption clause is the whole story. The bill preempts state causes of action about digital replicas, but carves out state statutes and common law rights already in existence as of 2 January 2025. Election-related and sexually explicit deepfake laws are separately preserved. Holland & Knight's June 2026 analysis reads the clause as leaving Tennessee's ELVIS Act untouched.

Then run the table against that cutoff. Tennessee, California, Illinois and New York's 2024 laws sit before 2 January 2025 and survive. Utah, Arkansas, Montana and Washington all arrived after, and their fate turns on how a court reads a preemption clause that commentators have already criticised as ambiguous. Any state that has not passed a digital replica law yet would largely lose the ability to pass one. So the map above may already be close to its final shape, fixed by a date in the past that almost nobody voted on with that consequence in mind. If you want the mechanics of the bill rather than the map, read what the NO FAKES Act would actually cover and who it leaves out.

You do not need a lawyer for a first answer. You need three searches and some scepticism about what comes back.

Start at your state legislature's own bill search, not a summary site. Search "digital replica", "digital likeness" and "voice" separately, restricted to the last three sessions. Legislature sites are ugly, and they are the only place that tells you whether a bill was enacted, amended after introduction, or quietly died in committee. Aggregator sites report Montana's statutory damages as a flat $50,000 per violation. Read HB 513 itself and that $50,000 attaches to distributing a tool whose purpose is producing unauthorised replicas of a named person. Publishing an unauthorised depiction of you carries $5,000.

Second, find your state's right of publicity statute if one exists, and read the definitions of "likeness" and "voice". If a definition says "actual or simulated", or mentions a computer or artificial intelligence, you are covered on paper. If not, you are relying on a judge to stretch a statute written about cereal boxes.

Third, check the exceptions in the statute rather than in a summary, because they are not uniform. Tennessee exempts news, public affairs and sports broadcasts, use for comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody, fleeting uses, and a person playing themselves in an audiovisual work, and every one of those applies only so far as the First Amendment protects the use. Montana's list is close to identical, with the same express First Amendment qualifier. California goes further than either: section 3344.1, as amended by AB 1836, adds a carve-out for a representation of someone as themselves in a documentary or in a historical or biographical manner, unless the work is meant to pass as an authentic recording. Biography and documentary are named in California and not in Tennessee or Montana, where a documentary maker would have to land inside news, scholarship or commentary instead. Some rows carry no expressive-use exception at all, because there is nothing there to except: AB 2602 is a rule about contract terms, not about publishing. Wherever a carve-out exists, that is where most claims die.

One thing worth doing today that has nothing to do with statutes: make a dated reference recording of your own voice, read from a passage you can name, and keep the original file with its metadata intact somewhere you control. If you ever have to argue that a recording is not you, a dated original of what you actually sound like is the difference between an assertion and evidence. How you would prove a voice is really you covers the method, and the wider defensive checklist sits in how to make your voice harder to clone.

Every protection above is territorial and reactive. Which one you get depends on where you live, and none of them move until the fake already exists. Then they ask you to prove a negative about a recording somebody else made.

There is a second half to the problem, and no legislature is drafting for that half: there is no authorised version of you. When a fake shows up, the question your family asks is not which statute applies. The question is which one is real. No statute answers that. The only thing that can is a version of you that you built and control.

The same silence covers the accounts already holding years of your words. Nothing in the table says anything about what a chat provider does with the record you have been building since 2023, which is a separate question with a separate answer per company, and what happens to your ChatGPT memories when you die walks through one of them. Publicity law reaches the fake and stops there.

That is the job Afterlife.ai™ does. A guide called Idy interviews you, in sessions, and your answers become memories rather than a transcript. Your voice is cloned from recordings you make yourself, with consent captured at the point of recording, so the reference set exists and its provenance is documented from day one. Personas answer from your own memories, and they never invent what was never said.

You nominate who can reach yours. Nobody else can, including us. Release runs through Executor Lock, a seven-day, evidence-verified process rather than a password handed over in a will. The seven days are deliberate friction, so a real person has time to notice and stop a release that should not happen. While you are alive you hold every control, and you can delete the whole thing.

I built this, so I will state the limits plainly. None of that stops anyone cloning your voice. Nothing does, which is the position this page has taken throughout. Consent captured at recording and a documented provenance trail are our own internal records, not a court-recognised standard, and no state above gives that trail any legal weight. Personas cannot testify, cannot file a takedown, and will not satisfy a platform that wants a government ID. What they change is what your family is comparing a fake against. Right now, for most people, that comparison is a scattering of voicemails and no reference point anyone ever agreed to. Timeless AI™ is the same product for people who want a version of themselves in use while they are living rather than after.

Your first fifty memories are free, no card, and the free build does not expire. If you want what sits beyond the free build, you can see the plans at your own pace.

Does the ELVIS Act protect me if I am not a musician?

Yes. Tennessee's law amended the state's Personal Rights Protection Act, which applies to every individual, not only recording artists. The Elvis branding and the music industry campaign behind the bill have led a lot of coverage to imply otherwise. The limit turns on what the other person did rather than on who you are: the use generally has to be commercial before the statute bites.

If my state has no digital replica law, do I have nothing?

Not necessarily. Most states recognise a right of publicity by statute or through their courts, and a synthetic voice used to sell something can sometimes fall inside a general publicity claim. You would also still have fraud, defamation, harassment and, for intimate images, the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act. What you lack is a statute that names the technology, which makes any claim slower and more expensive to run.

Will the NO FAKES Act override my state's law?

Not the older ones. As drafted, S. 4591 preempts state digital replica causes of action but preserves state statutes and common law in existence as of 2 January 2025, plus state laws on election deepfakes and sexually explicit content. Laws passed after that date, including Utah's, Arkansas's, Montana's and Washington's, sit in a more uncertain position. The bill is not law as at July 2026.

Can I stop an AI version of me being made after I die?

Partly, and it depends where you lived. Post-mortem digital replica rights exist in Tennessee (ten years from death, then conditional on continued commercial use), California under AB 1836, New York for deceased performers, and Montana for people domiciled there at death. Elsewhere your estate may have nothing. The practical options are set out in who controls your identity after you die.

Who owns the voice clone, you or me?

You do. Your recordings stay yours, the voice model built from them is licensed for use inside your account and nowhere else, and we never sell it, share it or use it to train a general model. The related question of what happens when a third-party AI company holds a clone of you under its own terms is covered in who owns your voice clone.

What happens to all this if the company goes under?

A fair question to ask any company holding something you cannot rebuild. Afterlife.ai™ is built so that your memories and your conversations stay exportable while you are alive, so you are never in a position where the only copy of what you have said sits on our servers. Read the current terms before you rely on any of this, and ask the same question of every other service you are considering.

• Who controls your identity after you die is the parent page for this cluster: the four parties who end up holding a piece of your face and voice, and what is technically possible rather than what is lawful.

• What the NO FAKES Act would actually cover takes the federal bill in detail, including the takedown mechanism and the seventy-year post-mortem term.

• How to make your voice harder to clone is the practical companion for anyone with no legal budget.

• Being remembered wrong sits outside the legal cluster and is why the map matters: a fake is half the harm, and the other half is that nobody can point at an authorised version of you.

Every state entry was built from the primary instrument first: enrolled bill text or the codified statute on the legislature's own site, checked against the signing and effective dates in the legislative record. Law firm alerts and the Congressional Research Service summary were used only as a second opinion on what a provision means, never as the source of a date or a figure. Where an aggregator and a bill text disagreed, the bill text won, which is how the misreported Montana damages figure was caught.

Not settled: the count of eight is a verified minimum rather than a certainty, because state sessions run continuously. How the NO FAKES Act preemption clause would treat the post-January-2025 laws is genuinely unresolved, and commentators disagree. Whether a general right of publicity stretches to a synthetic voice in states without a naming statute has not been tested in most of them.

Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us through contact and the correction goes in with the next review.

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1. Tennessee ELVIS Act, HB 2091, amending Tenn. Code Ann. § 47-25-1101 et seq. Signed 21 March 2024, effective 1 July 2024. Bill text.

2. Tenn. Code Ann. § 47-25-1104, exclusivity and duration, ten-year post-mortem term. FindLaw.

3. Davis Wright Tremaine, "Tennessee, All Shook Up Over AI-Generated Voice Replicas, Passes ELVIS Act", April 2024. Analysis.

4. Proskauer, "The King is Back (in the Digital Era): The ELVIS Act, Generative AI and Right of Publicity", 2024. Analysis.

5. California AB 1836, Civil Code § 3344.1. Signed 17 September 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Bill text.

6. California AB 2602, Labor Code § 927. Signed 17 September 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Bill text.

7. Illinois HB 4875, amending the Right of Publicity Act, 765 ILCS 1075. Signed 9 August 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Bill text.

8. New York Civil Rights Law § 50-f, digital replicas of deceased performers. Effective May 2021, amended and signed 11 December 2025. Statute.

9. New York S7676B, digital replica contracts under the General Obligations Law. Signed 13 December 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Bill text.

10. Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, on New York General Business Law § 396-b (synthetic performer disclosure, effective 9 June 2026) and the December 2025 § 50-f amendment. Client alert.

11. Utah SB 271, Unauthorized Artificial Intelligence Impersonation Amendments, effective 7 May 2025. Enrolled bill. Summary: Alston & Bird.

12. Arkansas HB 1071, Act 159 of 2025, amending the Frank Broyles Publicity Rights Protection Act. Signed 25 February 2025. Bill status.

13. Montana HB 513, signed 13 May 2025, effective 1 January 2026. Legislative record.

14. Washington SSB 5886, chapter 69, Laws of 2026. Signed 16 March 2026, effective 11 June 2026. Bill summary.

15. NO FAKES Act of 2026, S. 4591, 119th Congress. Advanced from Senate Judiciary on a unanimous voice vote, 18 June 2026. Not law as at July 2026. Congress.gov.

16. Holland & Knight, "Senate Committee Advances Bill to Protect Name, Image, Likeness and Voice Against Unauthorized AI Use", June 2026. Analysis.

17. Reed Smith, "AI and publicity rights: the No Fakes Act strikes a chord", on the post-mortem term and statutory damages. Analysis.

18. TAKE IT DOWN Act, S.146, 119th Congress. Signed 19 May 2025; platform notice-and-removal obligations from 19 May 2026. Congress.gov. Summary: Congressional Research Service LSB11314.

19. FCC Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17, 8 February 2024, confirming AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the TCPA. Ruling.

20. Justia, Publicity Rights Under State Laws, overview of statutory and common law recognition by state. Overview.

21. Tenn. Code Ann. § 47-25-1107, exemptions as amended by the ELVIS Act. News, public affairs or sports broadcast; comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody; a person represented as themselves in an audiovisual work; fleeting or incidental use. Each applies only to the extent the First Amendment protects the use, and neither biography nor documentary is named. Statute text.

22. California Civil Code § 3344.1(a)(2) as amended by AB 1836, source of the documentary and historical or biographical carve-out. Bill text.

23. California Labor Code § 927 as added by AB 2602, a contract rule carrying no expressive-use exemption. Bill text.

24. Montana HB 513, authorised print version HB0513.2. Source of the First Amendment exemption list, the $50,000 figure for the tool-distribution limb and $5,000 for publication, the ten-year descent and twenty-year termination, and the four-year limitation period. Bill text.

Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. This page carries live legislative claims and is on a 30-day recheck cycle until the NO FAKES Act's status settles.