Actress and MEP Eva Maydell revealed RSL Media’s Human Consent Registry at the European Parliament, a tool that allows anyone to set the terms in which AI can use their name, face and voice.
The context is surprisingly simple: your face, your voice, your name, treated as property that you can license or retain.
Cate Blanchett was at the European Parliament in Brussels and launched a free website that allows anyone to do exactly that, tell AI systems how they can use a person’s identity, or if they can do so.
The tool is called Human Consent Registryand is the first public product from RSL Media, the nonprofit Blanchett co-founded earlier this year along with Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther.
The launch event was organized by Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell of the European People’s Party and was attended by director Steven Soderbergh.
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“Your identity is your intellectual property in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it.” Blanchett said.
The registry, hosted at rslmedia.org, works like a traffic light. A user can allow the AI to use their name, image, voice, likeness and movement, allow it subject to terms, or prohibit it entirely.
Registration is free for people acting on their own behalf, and the system also supports third parties, such as agents, guilds, and administrators, who direct requests through an approved pathway.
RSL Media said the registry should eventually be extended to creative works, characters and brands.
Maydell described it as “a tool that makes rights transparent, increases trust, and keeps human creativity at the center of technological progress.”
The choice of location had its own argument: Parliament is the place where I HAVE to actThe world’s first comprehensive AI law was drafted and adopted.
The registration is the latest step in a campaign Blanchett has been waging for more than a year. In March 2025, he joined Paul McCartney, Ben Stiller and more than 400 artists in an open letter to the Trump administration, urging it not to roll back copyright protection.
That letter took direct aim at proposals from OpenAI and Google arguing that US copyright law should allow AI companies to train on copyrighted work without permission or payment, a fight that has only intensified since then.
RSL Media’s launch in May was supported by a long list of Hollywood names, including Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep. “Artificial intelligence technologies are expanding rampantly, essentially without control or regulation,” Blanchett said in a statement at the time.
“For humans to stay ahead of these technologies, consent must be the first consideration.”
The grievance to which the record refers is no longer abstract. Days before the launch in Brussels, the singer SZA hit out to musicians who support what she called “this degenerate shit,” after discovering that more than 200 of their songs had been fed into AI training sets.
Actor Matthew McConaughey, taking the property’s argument literally, has trademarked his likeness and voice, including the catchphrase “alright, alright, alright.”
What the registry cannot do yet is force anyone to respect it. Its premise is that a clear, machine-readable record of who has consented to what will give AI developers something they currently lack: a single place to check. Whether companies decide to look is the next question.
