Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

On February 15, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule that would ban the use of AI to impersonate individuals, which would extend protections of a recently finalized FTC rule against government and business impersonation.  The FTC announced a public comment period for a supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPR”) regarding the proposed rule that ends 60 days after being published in the Federal Register. The FTC’s swift action is in response to an AI-generated robocall mimicking President Biden that encouraged voters not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. FTC Chair Lina Khan described the FTC’s supplemental NPR as a key step in “strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to address AI-enabled scams impersonating individuals,” as malicious actors “us[e] AI tools to impersonate individuals with eerie precision and at a much wider scale.”

The supplemental NPR extends protections of the FTC’s new rule that “prohibits the impersonation of government, businesses, and their officials or agents in interstate commerce.” (16 C.F.R. Part 461). The FTC has asserted that that this new rule would expedite the time to obtain consumer redress by facilitating the FTC’s ability to bring Section 19 remedies in federal court where there currently is not an existing rule.