FCC moves to make AI voice cloning in robocalls illegal

Getting a spam robocall is annoying enough, but pick up the phone and hear a cloned President Biden telling you to skip election day, and it turns into a real problem.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel made a move to shut that down, proposing that using AI voice cloning in robocalls should be officially declared illegal under existing federal law.

Basically, the agency wants to make generating a fake voice on the phone a crime in itself, giving prosecutors an easy way to slam scammers before even proving voter suppression or fraud.

Repurposing an old law for modern fakes

Automated calls are not entirely illegal across the board, because schools and hospitals use them legitimately all the time. Right now, authorities usually have to prove a separate underlying crime, such as voter intimidation or financial fraud, to build a case against a bad actor.

That creates massive hurdles. For instance, in the recent New Hampshire primary incident where a fake Biden told people not to vote, prosecutors had to target voter suppression statutes to build charges.

Rosenworcel wants to bypass that dragnet. The FCC relies on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), an older law that already bans unauthorized artificial voices on calls.

Until now, it was debatable whether cloning a real person's voice strictly counted as an artificial voice. The FCC is proposing a Declaratory Ruling to explicitly classify AI voice cloning as artificial under the TCPA.

FCC spokesman Will Wiquist noted that the proposal is circulating internally and will be voted on at the commissioners' discretion. It will only become public once adopted.

Why it matters

We think this is a clever tactical move by the FCC, even if it is essentially a reactive patch.

Instead of waiting years for Congress to pass an all-new AI statute that would likely be obsolete on arrival, the FCC is stretching an existing 1991 telecommunications rule to give state attorneys general immediate ammo. If simply pressing play on a deepfake audio file is illegal, charging bad actors becomes much simpler.

That said, nobody should expect spam calls to drop to zero overnight. Fraudsters running off-shore VoIP networks already do not care about breaking the law, and proving identity behind spoofed numbers remains notoriously difficult.

It also leaves gray areas for businesses trying to use synthetic voices for legitimate customer support. But as an emergency firewall for upcoming elections, treating voice cloning as an automatic violation is the fastest tool regulators have right now.