Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz single-handedly blocked the NO FAKES Act from reaching a Senate floor vote on Wednesday 30 September, objecting under the chamber’s unanimous consent rules just months after the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee without a single dissenting vote. For now, the first federal law giving ordinary people — not just celebrities — a legal right to sue over a nonconsensual AI deepfake or voice clone is on ice.
Why it matters to creators
If you’ve ever worried about an AI tool generating explicit content with your face on it, the NO FAKES Act was the law most likely to give you a direct, nationwide route to sue whoever made it, whoever hosted it, and whoever profited from it — rather than relying on a patchwork of state laws that vary wildly in what they cover and how much you can recover. Its stall doesn’t remove any protection creators already have, but it does mean the strongest tool under discussion isn’t coming any time soon, and the gap it would have closed stays open.
What actually happened on the Senate floor
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the bill’s lead sponsor, asked for unanimous consent to bring the NO FAKES Act straight to a vote — a procedural shortcut that works only if no senator objects. Cruz objected. On the floor, Blackburn argued: “Our bill would establish clear guardrails that protect our creators in Tennessee and across the entire country.” Cruz raised free speech concerns, worried the bill’s definition of a “digital replica” could sweep up satire and other protected AI-generated content, and told Blackburn: “I am happy to work with you. But at least as of now, I object,” according to reporting from Deadline, syndicated via Yahoo News.
It’s a genuine rift between two Republicans who both voted the bill out of committee. Cruz had reportedly been trying to fold NO FAKES into a bigger package covering AI preemption and children’s online safety, and is said to have told the Oval Office that the broader deal had no realistic path through the Senate — undercutting Blackburn’s push in the process, according to Raw Story’s account of the clash. The bill itself, S.1367 on congress.gov, isn’t dead — a single objection doesn’t kill a bill, it just means Blackburn now needs Senate leadership to schedule floor time instead, which could take months or never happen this session.
What the bill would actually have changed
We covered the mechanics in detail when the NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously, so here’s the short version: it would create a federal “digital replica” right, letting anyone — not just public figures — sue over an AI-generated image, video, or voice clone made without consent, with statutory damages and a notice-and-takedown duty on platforms similar in spirit to copyright law. For creators, that would mean a direct federal claim against the person who built or ran the deepfake, not just the platform that hosted it.
That’s a meaningfully bigger stick than what currently exists. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, which we covered when the FTC’s 48-hour takedown rule went live in May, forces platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery — including AI-generated fakes — within 48 hours of a verified request. That’s genuinely useful and already working for creators today. But it’s a notice-and-takedown duty aimed at platforms, not a right to sue the person who made the deepfake in the first place, and it doesn’t touch the tools or the people building them. State laws fill some of that gap unevenly: Minnesota’s “nudify” ban, for instance, survived a First Amendment challenge in September, but plenty of states have nothing comparable on the books.
What this means if you’re in the UK
UK creators aren’t exposed in the same way at home. The Crime and Policing Act’s nudification and non-consensual intimate image offences, in force since 29 June, already criminalise creating or requesting a sexual deepfake of someone without consent, regardless of what’s happening with US federal law. Where the Senate stall does bite is for UK creators whose audience, and whose worst-case bad actors, are largely American: without a federal US civil right, a UK creator deepfaked by someone operating from the US still has to rely on the TAKE IT DOWN Act’s platform-level takedown process rather than a lawsuit against the person responsible, unless that person happens to be in a state with its own right-of-publicity or deepfake statute.
What to do now
- Keep using the TAKE IT DOWN Act process for any AI-generated or leaked intimate content — it’s live, it works on a 48-hour clock, and it doesn’t depend on Congress.
- Check your own state’s law if you’re US-based. Tennessee, Minnesota and a growing list of others already have deepfake or right-of-publicity statutes that may give you stronger protection than federal law currently offers.
- Keep dated screenshots and URLs of anything suspicious now, rather than waiting for a federal right that may take months to materialise — evidence is harder to gather after a site goes dark.
- Don’t assume this is settled. Blackburn can still push for floor time, and the bill could resurface folded into a different package; it’s worth a five-minute check on its congress.gov page every month or so rather than assuming it’s dead.
- UK creators: lean on the Crime and Policing Act offences already in force, and report US-hosted deepfakes through the platform’s TAKE IT DOWN process in parallel with any UK police report.
This is general information, not legal advice — speak to a qualified professional about your specific situation.
Elsewhere on NudeNewz: if platform crackdowns and AI impersonation feel like background noise to the day job, it’s worth remembering what the job can still pay — like the creator who bought her first property mortgage-free from OnlyFans income.
