The voice actors came first. Vanderbilt Law's analysis of cloned voices follows two performers who found their voices marketed by a platform they once recorded for, and maps the patchwork they had to sue through. Our database cannot tell their story, but it can count the patchwork: of the 91 laws we track, 18 records across 15 jurisdictions name voice, audio or likeness in what they cover.
The voice subset, counted
| Measure across the 18 voice and likeness laws | Count |
|---|---|
| Jurisdictions covered | 15 |
| Require consent for the depiction | 8 |
| Require labeling or disclosure | 6 |
| Carry criminal penalties | 9 |
| US jurisdictions among them | 9 |
The jurisdictions run from Tennessee (whose ELVIS Act remains the template) and Illinois (whose Digital Voice and Likeness Protection Act governs performers' contracts) to California, Michigan, Washington, Alabama, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, plus Argentina, Denmark, France, Spain, Taiwan and Thailand outside the US. The gap in the table is the consent line: fewer than half of the laws that name voice actually require consent to use it. The rest lean on fraud, election, or intimate-image hooks that a working voice actor's clone may never trigger, which is the patchwork problem in a single number.
For platforms, the practical read is narrower than the headline count. A voice-clone feature shipped into all 15 jurisdictions meets a consent duty in only 8 of them, a labeling duty in 6, and criminal exposure in 9, and the three sets barely overlap. Compliance by lowest common denominator (label everything, consent for everything) overshoots most of these laws; compliance by headquarters-state law undershoots several. That arithmetic, not any single statute, is why voice is the most lawyered corner of the deepfake map.
The Law Lookup filters the database by jurisdiction, so a performer can read their own state's record, and its limits, in one search.
Sources: Vanderbilt Law, Cloned Without Consent: The Patchwork Protection for Voice Actors from AI (the analysis modeled here); this site's deepfake law database, 91 laws, verified October 2026. Information only, not legal advice.