Law / United States / 
California
AB 730, as extended by AB 972, election deepfake disclosure law
In force since .
An AI transparency rule binding public and private bodies.
- Criminal exposure
- No
- Private right of action
- Yes
- Obligation class
- Content labelling, Prohibition
- Audit expectation
- none
- Setting the rule reaches
- Elections
What it requires
- Disclose that the media has been manipulated when you distribute materially deceptive audio or visual election media depicting a candidate within 60 days of an election
- The prohibition reaches distribution with actual malice, intending to injure the candidate's reputation or deceive a voter
- This statute was not a party to the litigation that reached AB 2839 and AB 2655, and it runs to
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.8Risks associated with transparency and accountability – as identified in the MAP function – are examined and documented.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-07Human-AI Configuration
- GAI-RISK-08Information Integrity
- OWASP Agentic Top 10
- ASI09Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
- MIT mitigations Draft
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
No regulator; enforced only by the candidate depicted, through a private civil action of the candidate's own.
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- When would a recording "falsely appear to a reasonable person to be authentic" under section 20010(e)(1)?
- Does a video that "constitutes satire or parody" fall outside section 20010 even when it carries no manipulation disclosure and a viewer could take it as authentic?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
The section prohibits distributing certain deceptive election media unless the distributor discloses the manipulation, and arms the depicted candidate with a private action. It states no duty to create, keep, or produce on demand any record of the distribution or the disclosure.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Prohibits, with actual malice, distributing materially deceptive audio or visual election media depicting a candidate within 60 days of an election, intending to injure the candidate's reputation or deceive a voter, unless the distributor discloses that the media has been manipulated. AB 972 extended the original sunset to , confirmed against FindLaw's codified-statute history note showing the section added by Stats. 2019, c. 493 (AB 730) and amended by Stats.
2022, c. 745 (AB 972), so the disclosure-exemption structure remains in force. This statute was not a party to the litigation that enjoined AB 2839 or struck down AB 2655. The effective date follows the standard non-urgency operative date for a bill approved , and is independently corroborated by multiple contemporaneous legal-press sources (Davis Wright Tremaine, Akin Gump) describing AB 730 as having taken effect .
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app generates audio with AI, generates images with AI or generates video with AI.
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Page updated .