Taylor Swift trademarking her voice and likeness points to a new legal frontier in combating AI deepfakes |
As one of the most popular celebrities in the world, Taylor Swift has already endured her share of AI-related abuse.
Fake nudes of the singer have spread widely online. Her voice and likeness have also been used to create fabricated political messages and bogus product endorsements.
In April 2026, Swift pushed back. Her intellectual property and brand management company, TAS Rights Management, filed trademark applications covering short audio clips of her voice and her visual likeness.
As a law professor, I was struck by Swift’s filings because they highlight a new legal frontier in artificial intelligence.
Most AI-related litigation has centered on copyright law, which protects creative works such as songs, books, photographs and recordings from being copied, distributed, adapted or publicly performed without permission.
But TAS Rights Management’s recent move involves trademark law, not copyright. The filings aren’t really about protecting Swift’s lyrics or albums. Instead, they’re about preventing AI-generated voices and images from misleading people into believing she has endorsed a product, political message or cause.
Copyright is about creative works
Most AI-related lawsuits have been tied to whether copyright violations have taken place – specifically, whether AI companies used copyrighted works to train their systems, or whether their chatbots have produced outputs that too closely resemble protected material.
For example, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging........