State Deepfake Laws in 2026: What's Changed and What's Next

Policy analysts reported that state lawmakers in 2025 had more success passing legislation narrowly targeted at deepfakes than enacting broad artificial intelligence regulation. Generative AI tools can create realistic imagery and audio for events that never happened. Bills addressed preventing the spread of sexual deepfake content as well as misleading political deepfake communications. Lawmakers in every state introduced bills addressing distribution of sexual deepfake content. Some focused on non-consensual sexual deepfakes, others on child sexual abuse material and some on both. High schools around the country dealt with proliferation of sexual deepfakes of students. Manipulation of content also appeared in political communications. In 20204 a U.S. Senate candidate created an ad featuring his opponent holding a sign she never held. Lawmakers sought to require disclaimers in political ads with digitally manipulated content. Some laws faced constitutional challenges. A federal judge struck down a California law as too broad and discriminatory based on content. California also had a law struck down that blocked online platforms from hosting deceptive political deepfake content related to an election. For 2026 lawmakers are expected to broaden their approach to include entities that enable production and dissemination of deepfakes such as generative AI platforms, payment processors, hosting platforms and cloud providers. The federal Take it Down Act passed in 2025 requires online platforms to take down AI-modified or generated non-consensual sexual content. States may push bills to require watermarks, digital signatures or cryptographic provenance tags on AI-generated audio and video potentially coordinated through standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.