RSL Media on May 12, 2026 launched the Human Consent Standard, a licensing protocol that lets individuals tell AI systems whether their likeness, voice, characters, and creative works are off-limits, available with conditions, or free to use. George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Kristen Stewart, and Steven Soderbergh are among the named backers, along with Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition. The nonprofit RSL Media, cofounded by Cate Blanchett, is overseeing the standard.
A central registry goes live in June, where people verify identity and publish their permissions. RSL Media will then translate those declarations into machine-readable signals that AI crawlers and model trainers can read at ingestion time. The discovery mechanism is the same robots.txt file websites already use to gate scrapers.
The Human Consent Standard extends the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard that launched last year for site-level signals. RSL Media cofounder Eckart Walther frames the difference plainly: "RSL usually applies to content at a specific URL, the Human Consent Standard applies to the underlying work, identity, character, or mark itself, wherever it appears." In other words, RSL gates a page; the Human Consent Standard travels with the person or the work.
Key facts
- 01RSL Media launched the Human Consent Standard on May 12, 2026, backed by George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Kristen Stewart, and Steven Soderbergh.
- 02A verification registry opens in June, letting people set AI permissions on their likeness, voice, characters, and creative works.
- 03The standard extends the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, which launched last year for website-level signals to AI crawlers.
- 04RSL Media is a nonprofit cofounded by Cate Blanchett; Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition are backing the rollout.
- 05AI systems discover the Human Consent Standard through a site's robots.txt, the same mechanism that gates web scraping.
Walther says the registry is meant to be the trusted publication layer. "The purpose of the Registry is to give people and rights holders a trusted place to publish those declarations, so responsible AI systems can check whether a work, likeness, voice, character, or brand is allowed, prohibited, or requires permission," he said.
“The Human Consent Standard applies to the underlying work, identity, character, or mark itself, wherever it appears — not just content at a specific URL.”— Jaeden Schafer
Blanchett pitched the rollout as broad rather than celebrity-only. "RSL Media is a simple, effective and free solutions-based technology for facilitating and activating consent. It's also the industry's first practical solution where people everywhere, not just public figures, can assert control over how their work is used by AI," she said in the announcement.
The standard arrives after a year of ad-hoc legal moves by individual artists. Matthew McConaughey has trademarked clips of himself. Taylor Swift filed for a trademark covering a photo and two voice clips, including "Hey, it's Taylor" and "Hey, it's Taylor Swift." Those filings work, but only for people with the budget and legal team to chase trademarks one asset at a time. A registry plus a robots.txt-style signal is meant to compress that workflow into a free, declarative step.
Architecturally, the standard depends on voluntary compliance from AI labs. Robots.txt has no enforcement teeth on its own — it is a convention that well-behaved crawlers honor, and that less scrupulous ones ignore. The same will be true here on day one. The leverage comes when major model providers commit to checking the registry as part of their training-data pipelines, and when courts and regulators begin treating a published Human Consent Standard declaration as evidence of withheld permission.
That second leg matters because identity-and-likeness disputes have been moving toward AI labs all year. Talent agencies, music rights organizations, and individual performers have been pressing for a mechanism that does not require a takedown after the fact. A pre-training signal that says "this voice, this face, this character is not licensed for training or generation" is the cleanest version of that ask.
The unanswered question is which AI companies will read the registry and act on it. The announcement names no model provider as a committed implementer. RSL Media's pitch implies that "responsible AI systems" will check, but adoption is the gating factor between a published standard and a working consent layer.
For the AI industry, the Human Consent Standard is the most concrete attempt yet to give the long tail of creators and performers a free, machine-readable way to opt out at the identity level rather than the URL level. If even one frontier lab wires the registry into its training pipeline, the standard becomes a de facto compliance checkpoint for the rest. If none do, it becomes a paper trail for the next wave of likeness lawsuits — which, given the celebrity roster on the announcement, is itself a meaningful outcome.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
