Law / United States / 
Pennsylvania
H.B. 811, civil liability for fraudulent misrepresentation of candidates by deepfake
Pa. H.B. 811, 2025-2026 Regular Session
Before the second chamber, dated , as of .
An AI transparency rule binding public and private bodies.
- Criminal exposure
- No
- Private right of action
- Yes
- How the hook was established
- express
- What makes it apply
- Operator establishment, Data subject residence
- Obligation class
- Prohibition, Content labelling
- Audit expectation
- none
- Setting the rule reaches
- Elections
Where it has got to
The text described here is Printer's Number 1819, as passed by the House. That print is PN 1819, published .
Locally, this stage is Senate Communications and Technology Committee.
The stage above is recorded at www.palegis.us.
House Communications and Technology Committee reported HB 811 as amended (PN 1819) 26-0 on . Re-committed to Rules and re-reported 33-0 on ; re-committed to Appropriations and re-reported 37-0, then passed the House 203-0 (third consideration and final passage) on . Referred to the Senate Communications and Technology Committee ; no action recorded since. The 2025-2026 session runs through .
What it requires
- Do not knowingly and intentionally disseminate, within 90 days before an election and with willful or reckless disregard for influencing its outcome, a campaign advertisement containing a deepfake of a candidate intended to misrepresent the candidate's words, actions, or beliefs.NIST AI RMFMAP 3.3
- A clear and conspicuous disclosure in the prescribed form, readable or audible to the viewer or listener, plus embedded tamper-evident content provenance identifying the content's creator and any subsequent editor, is a defense to liability.
- Comply with a court order for the immediate removal of the campaign advertisement and cessation of the activity complained of, which a court may issue while an aggrieved candidate's civil action is pending.no control in the NIST AI RMF
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
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-PREV-005System Acceptance Testing
- ETSI EN 304 223
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework, and in the NIST AI RMF, line by line beside each duty above. 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: a candidate aggrieved by a covered person may bring a civil action in a court of competent jurisdiction, and the court may impose the civil penalty in section 3(E). The bill names no public enforcer.
Settledness
The bill passed the House 203-0 and was referred to the Senate Communications and Technology Committee on , the last action recorded on the bill status page.
- As of
- Open questions
- Is the civil penalty a court may impose under section 3(E) of H.B. 811 payable to the aggrieved candidate or to the Commonwealth?
- Does "unique" synthetic content in section 3(E)(1) of H.B. 811 treat two advertisements that reuse the same deepfake clip with different surrounding material as one advertisement or two?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 3 makes a covered person liable for disseminating, within 90 days before an election, a campaign advertisement containing a deepfake of a candidate, unless the advertisement carries the clear and conspicuous disclosure of subsection (b); subsection (c) adds that content carrying the disclosure must carry embedded, tamper-evident digital content provenance naming its creator and later editors. The provenance travels with the content itself rather than being kept as a separate log, and the bill states no duty to create, keep or produce on demand a record of it or of the disclosure.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
This measure passed the Pennsylvania House 203-0 on and was referred to the Senate Communications and Technology Committee on ; it has not been reported from that committee as of the date shown.
As passed by the House, a covered person is liable for fraudulent misrepresentation of a candidate if, within 90 days before an election and with willful or reckless disregard for the possibility of influencing its outcome, the person knowingly and intentionally disseminates a campaign advertisement containing an artificially generated impersonation of a candidate (a deepfake) intended to misrepresent the candidate's words, actions, or beliefs.
A covered person is not liable if the advertisement carries a clear and conspicuous disclosure in a prescribed form, in a size or manner readable or audible to the viewer or listener, and content bearing the disclosure must also carry embedded, tamper-evident digital content provenance identifying its creator and any subsequent editor.
An aggrieved candidate may seek an order for immediate removal of the advertisement, and a court may impose a civil penalty per day of dissemination of up to $15,000 for a municipal candidate, $50,000 for a state candidate, or $250,000 for a candidate for President, Vice President, the U.S. Senate, or the U.S. House, doubled for a political action committee that only makes independent expenditures.
When LexLint raises it
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