Three days from now, the Senate Judiciary Committee votes.
S.4591, the NO FAKES Act of 2026, has been scheduled for an Executive Business Meeting and markup at 10:15 AM on June 11, the procedural step that moves a bill from committee consideration to a Senate floor vote. Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) controls the calendar. His decision to schedule a markup rather than additional testimony hearings is a signal worth noting. Markups don’t get called when the votes aren’t there.
The bill establishes a federal intellectual property right protecting individuals’ voices and visual likenesses against unauthorized AI replication. That covers synthetic voice cloning, AI-generated likeness, and deepfake video production in commercial contexts. It doesn’t matter whether the individual is a celebrity or a private person, the protection applies to anyone whose voice or image is replicated without consent.
Sponsorship is genuinely bipartisan. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) are lead Senate sponsors. On the House side, Rep. María Salazar (R-FL) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) have introduced a companion bill, H.R.The RIAA has formally endorsed the NO FAKES Act, and the bill is receiving active support from entertainment industry labor organizations.
NO FAKES Act, Known Positions
This is the fourth time Congress has introduced the NO FAKES Act in roughly three years, according to legal analysis from Manatt Phelps & Phillips. Previous versions stalled. What’s different this time is the markup scheduling, earlier iterations didn’t get this far in the committee process.
Key provisions include the platform safe harbor debate, which remains unresolved going into the markup. Liability protections for hosting providers are still under negotiation. How that provision lands will determine whether the bill is workable for technology platforms or whether it creates significant exposure for intermediaries hosting user-generated content.
This vote also arrives two days after New York’s AI Synthetic Performers Disclosure Law took effect. Federal legislation is moving at the same moment that state-level protections are already operative. If the NO FAKES Act clears committee and eventually passes, it will likely either preempt state laws like New York’s or coexist with them, and that interaction isn’t settled.
Timeline
The real question is whether the safe harbor provisions survive the markup intact. Technology platforms have been the consistent friction point in prior iterations of this bill. If the committee amends those provisions significantly, expect a floor vote to be more contested than the bipartisan sponsorship list suggests.
Don’t expect this to resolve cleanly on June 11. A committee vote is one step. Floor scheduling, potential House-Senate reconciliation with H.R.8915, and a presidential signature are all downstream. But the June 11 markup is the first concrete evidence in three years that federal AI performer protection legislation has the legs to move.