AB 2602 and digital replica clauses
California voids digital replica clauses that lack a specific use description and performer representation. What a compliant clause has to state instead.
In California a performer can sign a contract granting digital replica rights, and the clause can still be worth nothing.
That is the whole point of AB 2602, which took effect on 1 January 2025. It does not ban digital replicas and it does not create a new tort. It goes after a narrower failure: consent that exists on paper but was never informed. If you are the party relying on that consent, the clause is the asset, and AB 2602 sets conditions on whether the asset exists at all.
This is general information, not legal advice. Get counsel to draft or review anything you intend to rely on.
The two conditions
A digital-replica provision in a performer's contract is unenforceable unless both of these are true:
- The intended use of the replica is specifically described in the agreement.
- The performer was professionally represented when they agreed to it.
Miss either one and the grant fails. This is a validity rule layered on top of ordinary contract law, which means the rest of the agreement can be perfectly sound while the replica clause is the one dead paragraph in it. That is a worse position than having no clause, because you priced the deal as though you had the rights.
Why "any and all uses" is the exact thing this voids
The clause AB 2602 was written against is familiar to anyone who has read a talent agreement. It grants the producer the right to create and exploit "digital replicas" in "any and all media now known or hereafter devised," "in perpetuity," and it sits on page eleven of a document nobody expected to be read closely.
Here is roughly where the line falls. These are illustrative, not drafting language:
| Clause shape | Why it does or does not describe a use |
|---|---|
| "Producer may create and exploit digital replicas of Performer in any and all media now known or hereafter devised, in perpetuity." | Describes no use at all. This is the shape the statute exists to void. |
| "...for use in the Picture and any promotion thereof." | Names a project, not a use of the replica. A reader still cannot tell what will be generated. |
| "Producer may generate a synthetic voice replica of Performer from the session recordings, for ADR and additional lines within the Picture only, during post-production." | Names what is being replicated, what it will be used to make, and the boundary. |
The useful test when you are reading a draft: could the performer, from this paragraph alone, picture the finished thing? Not the project. The generated asset. If the sentence would equally cover a voice clone reading a pharmaceutical script two years later, it has not described a use.
The representation condition is not a formality
The second condition catches a different problem. A specific description does not help someone who has no idea what a digital replica is worth, or what they are giving up by scoping it broadly.
Practically, this changes who has to be in the room. If you are commissioning a replica from someone unrepresented — a background performer, a customer testimonial subject, a founder's cousin who agreed to be the face of the ad — you cannot fix the exposure by writing a better paragraph. The statute makes representation part of the validity test. The fix is that the person actually gets advice before signing, and the file records that they did.
Anyone commissioning from creators regularly should treat this as a process change rather than a template change. Our guide for influencer marketing agencies makes the same point from the commissioning side: the license needs to exist before production, not after a client asks where the clip came from.
What a compliant clause has to state
Working checklist. The first two items are the statutory conditions; the rest are what makes the first two actually operable.
- Which replica. Voice, face, full-body performance, or a combination. Say which. A voice grant is not a face grant.
- Built from what. The specific source material — named session recordings, a named shoot, a specific reference set.
- Used to make what. The specific production or asset type. "Additional dialogue in the Picture" is a use. "Marketing" is not.
- Running where. Media, platforms, territory. Territory matters more than it used to, because the governing regime depends on where the subject and the audience sit.
- For how long. A term with an end date, and what happens on renewal.
- What happens at expiry. Deletion of the trained model or voice embedding, not just of the delivered files. Those are separate things and only one of them is usually in the contract.
- Who else may use it. Sublicensing, assignment on a change of control, and whether the replica travels if the campaign is sold.
- Whether the material feeds training. A clip license and a permission to train a reusable model on that clip are different grants. Say which one you are getting.
- Who represented the performer, and when. Name and date, in the file.
Items 6, 8 and 9 are the ones that get dropped from otherwise careful drafts. The usage rights entry covers the vocabulary if you are writing this into a template for the first time, and legal and licensing for AI content in business has the wider contract-side view.
Where AB 2602 stops
It is a narrow instrument, and reading it as a general likeness rule leads people to the wrong conclusions elsewhere.
- It governs performer contracts, not every use of a face. Generating a replica of someone you have no agreement with is a right-of-publicity problem, not an AB 2602 problem.
- It is California. There is no federal right of publicity in the United States. The NO FAKES Act, which would create one, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 as S.4591 and is still a bill.
- It does not cover the deceased. Its companion, AB 1836, took effect the same day and requires estate consent for digital replicas of deceased personalities.
- Voice has its own regime elsewhere. Tennessee's ELVIS Act added voice as a protected personal right from 1 July 2024 and reaches tool providers, not only publishers. If a voice replica is involved, that statute is in scope regardless of what your California paperwork says. Our voice and likeness law overview has the comparison.
- It says nothing about disclosure. A valid grant does not exempt you from labelling. New York's synthetic performer disclosure took effect 9 June 2026 for ads reaching New York consumers, and EU AI Act Article 50 deployer duties apply from 2 August 2026. The cross-platform labelling checklist covers the operational side.
Making the clause survive contact with production
A clause is only as good as the record attached to the asset it authorised. The pattern that holds up is boring: for every generated asset involving a real person, keep the release, the date, the described use, the model used, and who represented the performer, in the same place as the file. When a client or a platform asks, that is a fifteen-minute answer rather than a discovery exercise.
If you are producing spokesperson or testimonial content at volume, the avatar generator and UGC video generator are the surfaces where this discipline matters most, because both produce assets that depict a person. Digital replica rights are turning into property covers why the licensing posture is shifting from tort to asset generally.
FAQ
Does AB 2602 apply if my contract says another state's law governs?
Do not assume a choice-of-law clause solves this. California has a strong interest in performers working there, and validity rules of this kind are frequently applied regardless of what the contract nominates. That is a question for counsel on the specific deal, not something to design around.
Is a clause void, or just unenforceable against the performer?
The statute renders the provision unenforceable. In practice that means you cannot rely on it as your permission, which is the outcome that matters — you are back to having generated a replica without a valid grant.
Can I cure a bad clause after the fact?
You can sign a new agreement that meets both conditions, with a specific use description and the performer represented. What you cannot do is retroactively make the old clause good for material already generated and published under it.
Does this apply to a replica of myself?
No. If you are generating a replica of your own voice or face for your own content, there is no third party whose consent is at issue. Cloning your own voice sidesteps the whole question, which is why it is the safest starting point for solo creators.