CDT Leads Coalition Opposing the NO FAKES Act
June 16, 2026 / Becca Branum
Today, CDT led a coalition of free expression and digital rights organizations in a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the NO FAKES Act in its current form. While CDT shares the goal of protecting people from deceptive and harmful AI replicas, the bill as drafted endangers vast amounts of First Amendment-protected speech. The NO FAKES Act would create a heckler’s veto over lawful expression and entrench the abuses of DMCA notice-and-takedown in vast new areas of speech. Protected satire, parody, commentary, and news would come down first, with speakers vindicated only if they fight back and, because platforms would face steep penalties for guessing wrong on contested constitutional questions, the predictable result would be over-removal and self-censorship. The bill also threatens the very people it hopes to protect, allowing the new likeness right to be licensed and enforced by parties other than the depicted individual and leaving ordinary people and performers with someone else’s control over their own face and voice. CDT was joined by The Future of Free Speech, the Organization for Transformative Works, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and R Street Institute in urging the Committee to look to existing law and pursue narrowly tailored solutions only where a genuine gap remains.