Tomorrow, June 10, a law goes into effect in Washington state that I have been waiting on for months. It is a small change to a statute most people have never heard of, the state's personality rights law, and it does something that felt impossible just a couple of years ago. It puts a price tag on stealing your face.

I get a version of the same question almost every week. Someone finds out a fake video of them is circulating, or a cloned version of their voice asked their mother for money, and once the panic settles, they ask me the thing they really want to know. Can I actually sue the person who did this? For a long time my honest answer was a frustrating "sort of, maybe, it depends." I hated giving it. The good news is that the answer is finally getting better, and fast.

Let me start with Washington, since it is the freshest. The new law, SSB 5886, expands the state's personality rights to cover what it calls a "forged digital likeness," which is a fancy way of saying an AI-generated fake of you that a reasonable person would believe is real. If someone uses one without your consent, they are now liable for a civil penalty of $3,000 per infringement plus your actual damages. The law firm Cooley, which tracks this stuff closely, has a clear breakdown of what changed, and it is worth understanding if you live there. I wrote about the bill when it passed, back when it was still just a promise on its way to becoming real. As of tomorrow, it is real.

Washington is not alone, and that is the part that gives me hope. On the federal side, the Senate unanimously passed the DEFIANCE Act in January, which gives victims of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes the right to sue in federal court. The numbers are not symbolic. Statutory damages start at $150,000 per violation and climb to $250,000 when the fake is tied to stalking or sexual assault, and survivors get a ten-year window to file. I want to be honest with you, because I always try to be. A House companion bill still needs a floor vote before this is fully law of the land. But a unanimous Senate is not nothing, and it tells you which direction the wind is blowing.

Then there is Connecticut, which did something I think is quietly brilliant. Its new law does not just let the state go after bad actors. It creates a private right of action, meaning you, the person who was harmed, can walk into court yourself. And crucially, you can also go after the platforms that keep spreading the images after they have been told to stop. That second part matters more than it sounds, because the individual who made the fake is often a ghost, and the company hosting it is not.

If you want proof that people are using these tools right now and not just filing them away, look at what is happening with Grok. xAI is facing a class action in federal court in California, Doe 1 v. X.AI Corp., with an early case management conference set for June 18 in San Jose. The Center for Countering Digital Hate found the tool generated roughly three million sexualized images in eleven days. A member of UK Parliament filed her own case against the company on June 3. This is no longer theoretical. Real people, with real names, are walking into real courtrooms.

Here is where I have to temper the optimism with a little reality. What you can recover still depends heavily on where you live and what kind of fake it is. The legislation is arriving in a patchwork, with 46 states now addressing sexually explicit deepfakes and only 30 covering deepfakes in political ads. If you want to understand how all these pieces fit together, I tried to map the bigger picture in my post on how the law is finally catching up to AI avatars, and I have written separately about the federal NO FAKES Act and what Ohio did to protect digital likeness rights. Read together, they show a country slowly deciding that your face belongs to you.

The most important thing I can tell you is this. If it happens to you, document everything before you do anything else. Screenshots, URLs, dates, the platform, any account that shared it. A case is built on evidence, and the evidence disappears fast. I walked through the immediate steps in detail in what to do if someone made a deepfake of you, and I would start there the moment you discover something.

I started this company because I watched how powerless this kind of violation makes people feel. So it genuinely moves me to write a sentence like this one: a year ago, suing was a long shot, and today it is a real and growing option. The law is catching up. Slowly, unevenly, but it is catching up.

If you are not sure how exposed you are right now, the best first move is to find out. Take our free 2-minute Deepfake Risk Assessment and see where you stand.