Home / Journal / The AI clause
The rules for using your likeness got written this year. Most contracts stayed silent.
European disclosure law came into force on 2 August 2026 and it reaches any content that lands in front of a European audience. A US likeness bill cleared committee in June. Meanwhile a reporter went looking for creators with AI clauses in their deals and could not find them.
What actually changed
Article 50 came into force on 2 August 2026.
The transparency obligations in the European AI Act took effect on 2 August 2026. In plain terms: content that has been generated or meaningfully altered by AI and is put in front of people has to be disclosed as such. That covers synthetic influencers, AI avatars and AI generated product imagery in advertising.
The penalty ceiling is up to fifteen million euros or 3% of worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. That is aimed at companies, not at individual creators, and I want to be clear about that before anybody panics.
The part that matters to you is the reach. It applies extraterritorially. If your content is seen by a European audience, the obligation is in play regardless of where you or the brand are sitting. Most creators reading this have a European audience whether they thought about it or not.
There is a further deadline behind it. Providers of generative AI systems that already existed have until 2 December 2026 to mark their outputs in a machine readable way. So the detectability of this stuff is about to change as well.
I am in Belgium. This is my jurisdiction, not a story about somewhere else, and it is the reason I am writing about it rather than waiting to see whether it matters.
The dates
2 August 2026: transparency obligations in force.
2 December 2026: machine readable marking required for generative systems already on the market.
Penalty ceiling: up to €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover.
Not legal advice
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is a description of a law with a date on it and links to the firms that summarised it.
A contract that matters to you is worth showing to somebody qualified.
The sequence
What moved in 2026, and what has not happened yet.
The gap
The law moved. The paperwork did not.
In November last year a reporter at Digiday went looking for creators whose contracts had gained AI clauses. She found five who said nothing had been added to their deals that year. One agency owner said she found it strange how little her clients were talking about it.
That is five creators, not a survey, and I would not build an argument on five. But it is the only reporting I could find where somebody actually tested the assumption, and it points the opposite way to the trade press narrative that everybody is adding AI clauses.
It matches what I see. The clause a brand is most likely to already have in its template is the one that lets it use your content in all media now known or hereafter devised. That wording predates all of this by decades and it was never written with synthetic media in mind. It is also, read literally, broad enough to cover it.
So the risk is not that a brand is going to ambush you with an AI clause. The risk is that your contract already says yes to something nobody was thinking about when it was drafted, and nobody has gone back to look.
Meanwhile the demand side is quieter than the headlines suggest. 89% of marketers say they have no plans to partner with a virtual influencer, and brand interest in AI creators has been falling rather than rising. Brands are not replacing you. They are just holding rights they never priced.
What else moved this year
Three things worth knowing, in the order they happened.
Disney ring fenced likeness separately from its characters
In December, Disney and OpenAI signed a three year agreement covering more than two hundred characters. The agreement states in terms that it does not include any talent likenesses or voices.
That is the largest IP licensor in the world treating a performer’s face and voice as a separate asset from the character they play. If it is separate for them, it is separate for you.
YouTube opened likeness detection to every adult creator
From May this year, any creator aged eighteen or over can opt into YouTube’s scanning for AI generated copies of their face. It works like Content ID, and it requires ID verification and a selfie video to enable.
It rolled out in stages from October 2025, to journalists in March and studios in April, before opening to everybody in May. If you have not switched it on, it is in Studio under content detection.
A US likeness bill cleared committee, unanimously
The NO FAKES Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June, without a vote against. It would create a federal property right in your likeness and voice against unauthorised digital replicas, for private citizens as well as celebrities, with a takedown process attached.
It is not law. It cleared a committee and awaits the full Senate. Anybody telling you it passed has not read past the headline.
What to put in the contract
Three lines, and they are all refusals.
First. No synthetic version of me. Nothing in this agreement grants the right to generate, train on, or publish an AI generated likeness, voice or performance of the creator. If a brand wants that, it is a separate negotiation and a separate fee.
Second. No training. The content delivered under this agreement may not be used to train any machine learning model. Brands increasingly hold libraries of creator content and there is nothing stopping them feeding it somewhere unless the contract says so.
Third. Disclosure sits with the brand. Where the brand generates or materially alters campaign content using AI, the brand is responsible for any disclosure required by law. You do not want to be carrying a compliance obligation for a piece of media you did not make.
None of that is aggressive and none of it costs the brand anything if they were not planning to do it. Which is precisely why it is a cheap thing to ask for now and an expensive thing to argue about later.
Voice is the one I would fight hardest on. A company cloned two creators’ voices without consent this summer, and a lawyer quoted in the reporting was blunt about the remedy: proving what a model was trained on comes down to litigation, subpoenas, and trying to uncork how the thing was built. That is not a fight you want to be in without a clause behind you.
The order to ask in
Ask for the training restriction first. It is the one brands agree to fastest, because most of them genuinely were not planning to.
Then the synthetic likeness restriction. Then the disclosure allocation, which is usually uncontroversial because it is already their legal problem.
What this is not
Not a prediction that brands are coming for your face. The evidence points the other way: adoption of virtual influencers is falling, not rising.
It is an argument for closing a gap while it is cheap to close.
Where this comes from
Every claim on this page, and where it was published.
This is a piece about law and reporting, so almost none of it is mine. Everything is linked, with the date, so you can check how current it is and read the original rather than my summary of it.
Where a source is thin, the page says so in the line itself rather than in a footnote.
- European Commission, guidelines on AI transparency obligations 2026. The primary source for what Article 50 requires.
- Cooley 3 August 2026. The in force date, the extraterritorial reach and the 2 December 2026 marking deadline.
- Davis and Gilbert 31 July 2026. What it means specifically for advertisers, synthetic influencers and AI generated product imagery, and the penalty ceiling.
- Holland and Knight 22 June 2026. The NO FAKES Act clearing Senate Judiciary on 18 June 2026. It is not law.
- YouTube blog May 2026. Likeness detection and how the rollout ran.
- OpenAI 11 December 2025. The Disney agreement, and the line stating it does not include talent likenesses or voices.
- Digiday 10 November 2025. The reporting that found creators with no AI clauses in their deals. Five creators, not a survey.
- Digiday 12 June 2026. The unauthorised voice cloning case and the lawyer on how hard it is to prove what a model was trained on.
- EMARKETER 16 January 2026. The 89% of marketers with no plans to use virtual influencers, citing Linqia.
What to do with it
Close the gap while it is cheap.
The clause this all sits inside is the usage clause, and the usage rights page takes it apart word by word. This piece is the new part. That one is the foundation.
The Brand Partnership Guide is 62 pages on the money and the paperwork, including the eight clauses that cause almost every argument.
The list
What brands are actually paying.
Rate breakdowns, pitch teardowns, and when a brand comes to me looking for creators, that goes out here first. The free guide arrives the moment you sign up.
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