Gavin Newsom signs election ‘deepfake’ ban in rebuke to Elon Musk

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the country’s toughest law banning digitally altered political “deepfakes” on Tuesday, following through on a vow to act after rebuking Elon Musk for sharing a doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The new California law — which will take effect before the November election — channels rising alarm about artificial intelligence’s capacity to disrupt elections by sowing misinformation, with voters increasingly confronted with deepfake images and audio impersonating candidates. Musk, who owns X, stoked that debate when he shared the AI-altered video of Harris in July, drawing Newsom’s public promise to prohibit similar practices.

“I could care less if it was Harris or Trump," Newsom told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during a conversation on Tuesday. "It was just wrong on every level.”

Newsom also signed a companion bill on Tuesday that targets deepfakes by compelling platforms to pull down such content when users flag them, although that bill will not take effect until next year. He signed a third measure requiring disclaimers on political ads that use AI.

The new laws help cement California’s leading role in regulating emergent AI even as the state’s homegrown tech industry has pushed back and blocked some laws . Democratic state lawmakers have embraced those efforts as a divided Congress struggles to advance meaningful legislation and concerns about AI’s potentially anti-democratic downsides reverberate around the world .

Newsom signed the measures on the same day Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff , the front-runner to become California’s next senator, helped introduce a similar bill to ban fraudulent AI campaign ads. Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco highlighted AI threats, including those emanating from foreign adversaries, during POLITICO’s AI and Tech summit on Tuesday.

“It is the ultimate double-edged sword: it holds great promise but also exceptional peril because it's lowering the barrier to entry for all sorts of malicious actors,” Monaco said. “There will be changes in law, I’m confident, over time.”

The California ban on campaign deepfakes will allow courts to issue injunctions blocking people from distributing intentionally deceptive political content during election season, and it exposes people who share deepfakes to civil penalties.

The bill was intentionally written to take effect before the November election. Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat and former county elections official who carried the bill, has repeatedly warned that the 2024 cycle represented the nation’s “first AI election.” The measure also includes deceptive content about election officials to shield against candidates and others targeting poll workers in the aftermath of elections, as former President Donald Trump has explicitly done.

The debate about AI in politics has set concerns about misinformation and election integrity against warnings about eroding free speech protections. Tech companies have argued restrictions on AI alterations may undercut the First Amendment, and Musk noted in an X reply to Newsom that “parody is legal in America.”

The back-and-forth between Newsom and Musk over AI content adds another chapter to their tumultuous, yearslong relationship.

A former San Francisco mayor with deep tech industry ties, Newsom has lauded Musk for helping to launch the electric car industry through Tesla, growing the company with the help of generous state subsidies . But they have clashed as Musk’s politics have veered to the right and he has blasted California officials for pandemic shutdown orders as well as transgender student privacy legislation .

Some of those disputes have played out in court. An appeals court recently backed X’s challenge to a 2022 law, signed by Newsom, that requires social media companies to disclose more information about their content moderation policies.