What Is the DEFIANCE Act? The Civil Remedy for Nonconsensual Sexual Deepfakes

What is the DEFIANCE Act?

DEFIANCE stands for the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images And Non-Consensual Edits Act. The 2025 version, S. 1837, was introduced on 21 May 2025 by Senator Dick Durbin with Senators Graham, Klobuchar, King, Lee, Heinrich, Welch, Schumer and Hawley, a deliberately bipartisan group. It does not create a new crime. It extends a civil claim that Congress created in 2022 for people whose real intimate images are disclosed without consent, so that it also covers images that were faked.

The bill's findings explain the reasoning. Apps that generate sexual forgeries need no technical skill, victims often cannot identify who made the content, and the harm is not reduced by a caption saying the image is fake. Congress describes such forgeries as a form of image-based sexual abuse.

What counts as an intimate digital forgery?

The bill defines an intimate digital forgery as an intimate visual depiction of an identifiable individual that falsely represents the person or the intimate conduct, was created with software, machine learning, artificial intelligence or other technological means (including by altering an authentic image), and is indistinguishable from an authentic depiction when viewed as a whole by a reasonable person.

Two details matter in practice. Identifiable is broad: a face is enough, but so is a birthmark or the name posted next to the image. And labels do not help the defendant. A depiction remains a forgery under the bill even if a label, caption or the setting says it is not authentic, which closes the defence that a watermark or disclaimer makes the content harmless.

Who could sue, whom, and for how much?

The person depicted, or a guardian if they are under 18, incapacitated or deceased, could sue in federal district court. The defendants are people who knowingly produced or possessed the forgery with intent to disclose it, knowingly disclosed it, or knowingly solicited and received it, where the victim did not consent and the defendant knew or recklessly disregarded that. A separate clause reaches anyone who knowingly produced a forgery that harmed or was reasonably likely to harm the victim, even without sharing it.

The remedies are designed so that a victim does not have to prove a dollar loss.

• Liquidated damages of $150,000, rising to $250,000 where the conduct was connected to actual or attempted sexual assault, stalking or harassment.
• Actual damages instead, including the defendant's profits, with the burden on the defendant to prove deductible expenses.
• Punitive damages, injunctions ordering deletion or destruction, and litigation costs including attorney fees.
• Privacy orders allowing a pseudonym, redacted filings and court custody of the images.
• A 10-year limitation period from the later of discovering the violation or turning 18.

How does the DEFIANCE Act differ from the TAKE IT DOWN Act?

The two laws are complementary. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed on 19 May 2025 as Public Law 119-12, makes publishing nonconsensual intimate images, including digital forgeries, a federal crime and requires covered platforms to remove valid reports within 48 hours. DEFIANCE would give victims a private claim for money and injunctions against the individuals responsible. Neither preempts state law; the DEFIANCE text says states may keep or adopt rules that are at least as protective.

Has the DEFIANCE Act passed?

Not fully. The Senate first passed a DEFIANCE bill by unanimous consent on 23 July 2024, in the 118th Congress, but the House did not act before that Congress ended. The 2025 bill passed the Senate without amendment on 13 January 2026, again by unanimous consent, after a wave of public concern about sexualised AI images generated on social platforms. At the time of writing, the Government Publishing Office had published only the Senate-engrossed text, which means the bill still needs a House vote and the President's signature.

Organizations should therefore treat DEFIANCE as a likely future exposure rather than a current one. The obligations that apply today come from the TAKE IT DOWN Act and from state law; Ballotpedia counted 48 states with laws on sexual deepfakes in July 2026.

Platforms and employers can prepare without waiting. Keep reported images and their metadata under restricted access, record who viewed them, and retain the earliest copy you received. If DEFIANCE becomes law, victims will seek exactly those records in discovery, and a company that already handles them carefully will spend less time reconstructing what happened.

How would a victim show an image is a forgery?

A DEFIANCE claim requires an intimate digital forgery, so a plaintiff benefits from evidence that the image was generated or altered. Testimony from the victim is often the strongest proof, but a forensic analysis adds an independent technical account: which regions show face manipulation, whether pixel-level traces match generative models, and how confident the analysis is. Courts will also want to know how that evidence was produced and whether it can be reproduced.

NeuroDetect is built for that kind of file. An analyst uploads authorised media into a case; each analysis keeps model and version context; heatmap and attention views show the regions or frames behind a finding; and the downloadable forensic report records observations, uncertainty, provenance and analyst notes. Neural Defend's ARCAS 1B model, described in a September 2026 arXiv paper, reports pooled accuracy of 99.99% on GenImage and 97.65% on OpenFake, and Neural Defend ranked first of 36 systems on the public VendorBench-100 image benchmark.

Detection has limits in litigation. It cannot identify who made an image, prove lack of consent or show what a defendant knew. Heavily recompressed screenshots can also weaken a result, which is why preserving the earliest available copy matters.