EU lawmakers deal to ban AI non-consensual intimate deepfakes

This article was published on March 12, 2026 A March 11 political agreement on AI Act amendments will add an explicit prohibition on non-consensual intimate AI-generated images, direct fallout from the Grok scandal. It took a scandal, a wave of regulatory anger, and a coalition of 57 European Parliament members to get there, but the EU’s landmark AI Act will now contain an explicit ban on non-consensual sexual deepfakes. On 11 March 2026, EU lawmakers struck a political deal on a package of amendments to the bloc’s AI law, with the prohibition of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images, including child sexual abuse material, emerging as one of the most contested and consequential items in the agreement. The deal, brokered between centre-right and centre-left lawmakers in the European Parliament, also includes eased compliance rules for AI systems embedded in sector-regulated products such as medical devices and industrial machinery. The package forms part of the broader AI Act Omnibus, a set of amendments being negotiated to streamline and in some cases strengthen the 2024 law as it moves toward full applicability. The sexual deepfakes ban was never meant to be part of the Omni