Law / United States / 
Montana
Digital Likeness and Voice Rights Act (HB 513, 2025), unauthorized AI depiction liability
2025 Mont. Laws ch. 685 (HB 513); Mont. Code Ann. tit. 30, ch. 14
In force since .
An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.
- Criminal exposure
- No
- Private right of action
- Yes
- Audit expectation
- none
- Setting the rule reaches
- General
What it requires
- Do not distribute, transmit, or otherwise make available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service, or device with actual and specific knowledge that its primary purpose is to produce an unauthorized digital voice or visual depiction of a particular, identified individual for commercial use
- Do not intentionally publish, perform, distribute, transmit, or make available a digital voice or visual depiction of an individual for commercial use, knowing it is not authorized by the individual or the holder of the individual's property rights
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 3.3Targeted application scope is specified and documented based on the system’s capability, established context, and AI system categorization.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-08Information Integrity
- GAI-RISK-11Obscene, Degrading, and/or Abusive Content
- MIT mitigations Draft
- NIST Privacy Framework
- CT.PO-P1Policies, processes, and procedures for authorizing data processing (e.g., organizational decisions, individual consent), revoking authorizations, and maintaining authorizations are established and in place.
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-PREV-005System Acceptance Testing
- ETSI EN 304 223
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
Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Private plaintiffs: the individual whose name, voice, or visual likeness is at issue, or a person to whom that individual assigned, bequeathed, transferred, or exclusively licensed those rights. The Act names no public enforcer.
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does "commercial use" in section 1(3)(a) and (3)(b), which section 1(10) does not define, reach a depiction posted on a personal account that carries no advertising?
- Does a general-purpose image or voice generator have "the primary purpose" of producing a depiction of "the particular, identified individual" under section 1(3)(a) when a user can prompt it to depict that individual?
What it reaches
How the hook was established
express
What makes it apply
Data subject residence
Obligation class
Prohibition
Applicability criteria
These tests decide whose name, voice and visual likeness the property right protects.
- As of
- Combinator
- Any of
- Criteria
- the individual is a resident of this state
- the individual is domiciled in this state at the time of their death
What it makes you log
Logging duty
The Act creates a property right in name, voice, and visual likeness and a civil cause of action against a person who distributes a tool built to produce an unauthorized digital depiction or who publishes such a depiction knowing it is unauthorized. It imposes no duty on anyone to log, record, or otherwise document a depiction, a distribution, or the belief that a use was authorized; the objectively-reasonable-belief provision is a defense to liability, not a record-keeping duty.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
The Digital Likeness and Voice Rights Act gives a Montana resident, or a person domiciled in Montana at death, a property right in their own name, voice, and visual likeness, freely transferable and descendible, that does not expire on death and continues for 20 years afterward in the rights holder's executors, heirs, transferees, or devisees.
A person is liable for actual damages and any profits from the unauthorized use if, without the consent of the individual or the rights holder, the person distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology whose primary purpose, known to that person, is to produce an unauthorized digital voice or visual depiction of a particular, identified individual for commercial use, or if the person intentionally publishes or distributes such a depiction for commercial use knowing it is unauthorized.
A digital voice or visual depiction is one newly created or altered using digital technology so that it is nearly indistinguishable from the individual's actual voice or likeness and a reasonable person would believe it genuine. A person who held an objectively reasonable belief that the material did not qualify as an unauthorized depiction is not liable for damages.
The action may be brought by the individual or by an assignee, transferee, or exclusive licensee of the rights, within 4 years of discovery of the violation, and does not apply to a provider of broadband internet access service.
Exemptions, to the extent the use is protected by the First Amendment and the Montana Constitution's free expression clause, cover news-gathering, public affairs and sports reporting, comment, criticism, scholarship, satire and parody, and an individual's authentic self-representation in an audiovisual work. The act took effect under its own effective-date clause. It directs its own codification as part of Title 30, chapter 14.
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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