Is it legal to make an AI of a dead person? The 2026 answer, state by state and country by country

AI of a dead person: any AI system that imitates someone who has died, from a text chatbot trained on their messages to a cloned voice or a video avatar. Researchers call them griefbots, deadbots or postmortem avatars.

Right of publicity: a person's right to control commercial and public uses of their name, voice and likeness. In many states it continues after death and belongs to the estate.

Digital replica: a realistic, computer-generated copy of a real person's voice or appearance, the term used in US federal and state AI laws.

Estate: the people who hold a dead person's rights, usually the executor named in the will, and the heirs or beneficiaries who inherit.

The law regulates what you do with an AI copy of a dead person, far more than whether you make one. Almost every rule in this guide is triggered by one of three things: putting the copy in front of the public, using it to make money, or selling a tool built to copy a specific person. A grieving son who builds a chatbot from his father's text messages and keeps it on his own phone is, in most of the United States, outside the reach of any publicity statute. The same son who posts videos of the chatbot to a monetized channel, or sells access to it, is inside several.

The second thing the law cares about is who said yes. While a person is alive, the only consent that counts is theirs. After death, the right passes to their estate, which in practice means the executor and the heirs named in their will, or the relatives who inherit under state law if there is no will. That is why the same AI can be lawful in one family and unlawful in another: the question is never only "is it legal," but "who authorized it."

The third thing, and the one most people miss, is that the person's own written wishes can outrank the family. California lets a person transfer their post-mortem rights by contract, trust or will. China's Personal Information Protection Law lets the next of kin act on a dead person's data "except where the deceased has arranged otherwise before their death." A clear decision made while alive is the strongest instruction any of these systems recognizes, and it is also the one almost nobody leaves.

There is no federal law yet. The NO FAKES Act, which would protect every person's voice and likeness for at least ten years after death, cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2026 but was blocked on the Senate floor on September 30, as our NO FAKES Act status tracker explains. Until it passes, the answer depends on the state. The table below covers the states with the clearest after-death rules.

Two details change real outcomes. California's protection applies to a "deceased personality," someone whose name, voice or likeness had commercial value at death or because of it, so it reaches a local radio host as well as a film star, but probably not a private person with no public profile. New York draws a similar line. Tennessee, Illinois, Florida and Montana do not require fame at all, which is why an ordinary family in those states has stronger tools against a public AI fake than a famous family in some others.

Outside the United States, very few countries have an after-death rule written for AI, and the ones that do protect the family's interests rather than the public's curiosity. The table draws on our deepfake laws by country tracker, which covers 17 jurisdictions and is re-checked monthly.

The law in this area has been written by a handful of cases in which a dead person's voice was used by people who believed they knew what the person wanted. In 2021, the documentary "Roadrunner" used AI to recreate Anthony Bourdain's voice reading words he had written; the director said he had the approval of Bourdain's estate, and Bourdain's former wife publicly said she was not the one who had approved it. In April 2024, Drake released a track with AI copies of Tupac Shakur's and Snoop Dogg's voices, and the Shakur estate's lawyer gave him 24 hours to take it down, citing the estate's publicity rights. That same year, George Carlin's estate sued over an AI "comedy special" in his voice, and the makers agreed to take it down permanently.

The cases of 2026 were sharper still. Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Arizona in 2021, and at his killer's sentencing in 2025 his sister played an AI video in which a replica of him spoke of forgiveness. The judge said he "loved" it and imposed the maximum sentence. On September 30, 2026, the Arizona Court of Appeals vacated that sentence, calling the decision to allow the video a "fundamental error" and noting that it presented "a depiction of the victim and his thoughts created from the imaginings of the victim's sister" (NBC News). And when Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, a fake AI recording of her voice describing a "final wish" was already circulating, as our guide to the ELVIS Act and her estate explains.

Each of those families, and each of those producers, acted on a belief about what the person wanted. None of the people portrayed had written it down. That is the pattern the laws above are trying to fix, and it is the gap researchers keep identifying: Cambridge researchers called in 2024 for the consent of the person whose data builds an AI of the dead, and a Lehigh University audit of 93 AI afterlife services found that 82 publish thin or no information on who has authority over a recreation.

Most griefbot apps put the legal question on you. Their terms typically require you to promise that you have the right to upload someone's messages, photos or voice, which means that if an estate objects, the user who uploaded the material carries the risk. Few of them say what happens to the recreation if the company closes, and several AI companion and legacy companies have shut down or been sold in the past two years, as our guide to what a griefbot is details.

Afterlife.ai™ takes a different position, written into our Terms: nobody may build a Persona of another person, living or dead, without that person's explicit written consent or the consent of their legal estate representative (section 5.1). We do not offer to recreate someone who has died. Every Persona on Afterlife.ai™ is built by the person it portrays, from their own memories and in their own voice, which is the one kind of AI likeness every law in this guide is designed to allow.

You have more options than an AI copy, and most of them are legal everywhere. Save every real recording you have, because a person's actual voice is irreplaceable and often scattered across phones and apps; our guide on how to save WhatsApp voice messages walks through the steps. Ask the executor before you use the person's voice or likeness anywhere public, since the estate may hold rights you would otherwise infringe. And if you find a fake of them online, report it to the platform, and tell the executor, who may be able to act under state law.

If you still want an AI built from their messages for your own private use, read the service's terms first, and think about the people who share those memories with you. A recreation that one sibling finds comforting can feel like an intrusion to another, and the estate is the one place where those disagreements are meant to be settled.

Then the decision is still theirs to make, and the law gives their own consent more weight than anything their family could decide later. The most useful thing you can do is help them make it: record their stories and their voice now, in their own words, and let them name the people they trust to decide what happens afterwards. Under every law in this guide, an AI that your mother built of herself, while alive, with her own consent, stands on firmer ground than anything her children could build after her death.

That is what Afterlife.ai™ is for. Your parent builds their own Persona from their memories and in their own voice, and names the people who step in under Executor Lock™, so the consent is theirs and the decisions after their death are made by people they chose. Executor Lock™ works alongside a will, not instead of it, and our guide to leaving permission for an AI of you in your will explains how the two fit together.

Decide now, in writing, and make your decision easy to find. A will or trust can say who holds your voice and likeness rights after death and what they may and may not authorize, and in California and many other states those documents control who owns the right. A record of your own consent, and of what you never agreed to, gives your family the evidence to fight a fake. And naming a specific person to make the calls you cannot foresee matters as much as anything you write, because a right that nobody knows they hold protects no one.

The simplest way to do all three is to make the AI yourself, so the only version of you that exists is the one you approved. Idy built Executor Lock™ for exactly this, before it built anything else, and holds 78 patents pending on the governance behind it, with international protection sought under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. You build your Persona, you name who takes over, and at the lock your Persona's personality is sealed, so nobody, family included, can turn you into someone you were not.

State post-mortem terms come from the Right of Publicity Roadmap maintained by Professor Jennifer Rothman, checked on October 28, 2026 for California, Tennessee, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Florida and Washington. Montana's rules come from the enrolled text of HB 513, and California's digital replica and registration rules from Civil Code section 3344.1 and Manatt's summary of AB 1836. The country rules come from our deepfake laws by country tracker, with Denmark's bill L 49 checked against reporting on its introduction. The Pelkey ruling comes from NBC News, the Tupac Shakur letter from Engadget, and the federal bill's status from the reported text of S.4591. Afterlife.ai™ policies come from our Terms of Service, section 5.1. This guide explains the law in plain English and is not legal advice; for a decision about a specific person, speak to a lawyer in the state or country where they lived.