TennesseeAI regulation

Regulation Status

• Tennessee was the first US state to legislate against AI voice and likeness cloning. Governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024, HB 2091 / SB 2096) on 21 March 2024, effective 1 July 2024; it recasts the state's Protection of Personal Rights law to create a property right in an individual's name, photograph, voice, and likeness, and targets generative-AI cloning tools whose primary purpose is unauthorized reproduction of a person's voice or likeness.
• The state also expanded criminal and privacy law. HB 2163, effective 1 July 2024, brought AI-altered and AI-generated matter within existing child-pornography statutes, and the Tennessee Information Protection Act (Tenn. Code Ann. Section 47-18-3301), effective 1 July 2025, gives consumers a right to opt out of solely automated profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects and requires data-protection assessments, enforced by the Attorney General with penalties up to $7,500 per violation.
• In 2026 Tennessee entered the AI-and-health space. Governor Lee signed SB 1580 on 1 April 2026, effective 1 July 2026, barring developers or deployers from advertising or representing an AI system as, or as able to act as, a qualified mental health professional, with violations treated as deceptive acts under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and civil penalties up to $5,000 per violation. Tennessee has also excluded artificial intelligence from statutory definitions of "person," "human being," "life," and "natural person," and has not enacted a comprehensive, risk-based AI statute.