A model signs a release for a plain-background catalog shoot. Months later she's looking at an image of herself she never posed for: legs draped over a barstool, a cocktail in hand, a scene that never happened. That's not a hypothetical. It's the allegation at the center of Pujols v. Rainbow Shops, and it's the exact scenario Congress has spent two years trying to legislate around. If you're an independent designer who hires models, licenses AI-generated 'digital twins,' or works with a photographer who touches up images in ways you don't fully understand, this bill is worth your attention now, before it becomes law and not after.
What changed
On June 18, 2026, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced S.4591, the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, known as the NO FAKES Act. The U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary unanimously advanced by voice vote S. 4591, formally titled the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2026 (NO FAKES Act), on June 18, 2026. The bill now sits with the full Senate, and nobody knows when, or if, it gets a floor vote. Three Republican senators voted yes in committee but flagged First Amendment worries on the way out, and it's unclear when or if the legislation will make it to the Senate floor, and when the bill was first introduced in 2024, it never got out of committee. Substantively, the bill would do something the United States has never had: a federal intellectual property right to protect individuals from unauthorized digital replicas of their voice and visual likeness, giving each individual or right holder the right to authorize the use of a digital replica embodying their voice or visual likeness. That right is personal. It is not assignable during the individual's lifetime but is licensable and does not expire upon the individual's death. Anyone who distributes an unauthorized replica faces civil liability, and the bill borrows its enforcement mechanism from copyright law: a streamlined notice-and-takedown process, borrowed from the DMCA, so a person whose likeness was used without permission can demand removal rather than being forced into immediate litigation. There are carve-outs for news, satire, and other protected speech, and the bill would generally preempt state laws going forward, though it preserves existing ones.
Who it affects
If you commission photography, work with a modeling agency, or use an AI tool to generate or extend a model's likeness across a lookbook, this touches you directly. It also touches the model, and that's where the current legal gap is doing real damage. While NO FAKES sits in Congress, disputes are already being fought under existing contract law, and the results aren't reassuring for anyone who assumed a standard release covers AI extrapolation. In the Rainbow Shops case, the retailer's own defense makes this plain: it argues its model release lets it use images regardless of the technology involved, whether photoshop, AI, or any other enhancement, and that the dispute should turn on the terms of the parties' existing contracts rather than on the novelty of the technology. That's the sentence that should worry every designer who has ever used boilerplate language granting 'the right to alter, edit, or otherwise modify' a model's image. Broad, generic release language, written years before generative AI existed, is now being read by at least one defendant as authorization for wholesale AI reinvention of a person's image. Whether a court agrees remains to be seen, but the fact that the argument is even plausible tells you the old language wasn't built for this.
What to do about it
Don't wait for NO FAKES to pass before you fix your paperwork. First, look at every model release or agency agreement you currently use and ask whether the AI-use language is specific. 'Minor edits' or 'alterations' is not the same as 'generate new images depicting the model in poses, settings, or compositions not captured in the original photography,' and that distinction is exactly what's being litigated right now. Write the specific case in, or write it out. Second, if you work with digital twins or licensed AI likeness of a real model, get the license in writing, define the scope (which garments, which campaigns, which duration), and don't assume a single sitting buys you unlimited AI reuse. Third, keep an eye on New York if you shoot there: separate from the federal bill, the state's Fashion Workers Act already requires documented consent before a brand uses AI-generated imagery of a real person commercially, and that obligation exists today, not someday. Finally, understand what NO FAKES would and wouldn't change for you. It would give models a federal claim they don't clearly have now, and it would preempt some state-law variation, but it wouldn't rewrite your existing contracts retroactively. The designers who avoid trouble here are the ones treating consent as an ongoing, itemized permission, not a one-time signature buried in a call sheet.