The actor and MEP Eva Maydell revealed RSL Media’s Human Consent Registry at the European Parliament, a tool that lets anyone set the terms on which AI can use their name, face and voice.
The context is disarmingly simple: your face, your voice, your name, treated as property you get to license or withhold.
Cate Blanchett stood in the European Parliament in Brussels and launched a free website that lets anyone do exactly that, telling AI systems how, or whether, they may use a person’s identity.
The tool is called the Human Consent Registry, and it is the first public product from RSL Media, the nonprofit Blanchett co-founded earlier this year alongside Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther.
The launch event was hosted by Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell, of the European People’s Party, and attended by the director Steven Soderbergh.
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“Your identity is your IP 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 something like a traffic light. A user can allow AI to use their name, image, voice, likeness and movement, allow it subject to terms, or prohibit it outright.
Registration is free for individuals acting on their own behalf, and the system also accommodates third parties such as agents, guilds and managers who route requests through an approved pathway.
RSL Media said the registry should eventually extend to creative works, characters and brands.
Maydell described it as “a tool that makes rights transparent, scales trust, and keeps human creativity at the centre of technological progress.”
The choice of venue carried its own argument: the Parliament is where the EU AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law, was shaped and adopted.
The registry is the latest move in a campaign Blanchett has been waging for over a year. In March 2025, she 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 let AI companies train on copyrighted work without permission or payment, a fight that has only sharpened since.
RSL Media’s own launch in May drew support from a long roster of Hollywood names, among them Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep. “AI technologies are expanding rampantly, essentially unchecked and unregulated,” Blanchett said in a statement at the time.
“In order for humans to remain in front of these technologies, consent must be the first consideration.”
The grievance the registry speaks to is no longer abstract. Days before the Brussels launch, the singer SZA hit out at musicians backing what she called “this degenerate shit,” after finding that more than 200 of her songs had been fed into AI training sets.
The actor Matthew McConaughey, taking the property argument literally, has trademarked his image and voice, the “alright, alright, alright” catchphrase included.
What the registry cannot yet do is compel anyone to honour 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. If the companies choose to look is the next question.
