United States: AI and scraping law

United States

AI law

As of 2026-08-14, no enacted federal statute imposes a general duty to disclose that content is AI-generated or to label or watermark synthetic output. Federal action is narrow and piecemeal: the TAKE IT DOWN Act (2025) imposes a takedown, not a labeling, duty specific to nonconsensual intimate imagery including AI deepfakes, and is named here but deliberately not catalogued as an instrument, because tagging a victim-triggered removal duty as an AI-transparency obligation would report a federal labeling duty that does not exist to anything filtering this corpus by law family; an FCC rulemaking proposing AI-content disclosure in broadcast political ads was never finalized and its status under the current Commission is unresolved; and a bipartisan Senate bill, the AI Labeling Act of 2026, would impose a general labeling duty but has not moved past committee referral. FTC Act Section 5 is deliberately excluded from this document: it polices AI-related deception after the fact through the FTC's general unfair-or-deceptive-practices authority, and is not an affirmative disclosure or labeling mandate, so it does not belong in a transparency and output-labeling inventory even though the legacy corpus tagged it as disclosure-related.

23 instruments named 2 researched in detail As of 2026-08-14

Instruments

Each one links to its LexLint note, which carries what it requires and what it flags on.

AI transparency

AI Labeling Act of 2026

S. 4915, 119th Congress Proposed official GovInfo bill text (introduced version)

As introduced, would require providers of generative AI systems to attach a visible disclosure to AI-generated image, video, and audio content, plus a machine-readable provenance record of the system used and the creation time, and would direct developers and major social media platforms to cooperate so users can identify content authenticity. Introduced 2026-06-24 by a bipartisan group of senators and referred to the Senate Commerce Committee, with no committee vote or floor action found; it is the closest thing to a marquee federal AI-labeling proposal as of this research.

FCC AI Political Ad Disclosure Rulemaking, Docket 24-211

FCC 24-74, WC Docket No. 24-211 Proposed official Federal Register notice

As proposed and never adopted as a final rule, would require on-air and written disclosure of AI-generated content in radio and television political advertisements by entities with existing public-file obligations. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was adopted 2024-07-10 on a 3-2 party-line vote with the now-Chairman dissenting; this research could not confirm whether the current, differently constituted Commission has formally terminated or continued the docket, so its procedural status remains open and it is treated here as stalled but not confirmed dead.