First-order effects

• State legislatures, led in part by California, have made deepfake governance a live compliance and legal-risk issue across far more jurisdictions than in 2023.
• Platforms, AI providers, advertisers, and political campaigns now face a larger and more varied set of state rules governing synthetic media, rather than waiting for a federal framework.

Second-order effects

• Companies operating nationally will have stronger incentives to build reusable disclosure, consent, provenance, and complaint-handling processes that can accommodate the strictest applicable state rules.
• The widening patchwork raises the value of tools and services that help identify, label, or document synthetic content, while increasing legal and operational complexity for smaller creators and campaigns.

Third-order effects

• If state lawmaking continues to outpace federal action, deepfake policy may develop through state-level precedents and de facto national compliance baselines rather than a single uniform rulebook.
• The shift places synthetic-media governance alongside broader public-safety AI policy, with the eventual degree of interstate divergence depending on whether lawmakers converge on common obligations.