RSL Media and its celebrity backers are positioning the registry as a democratic, public-service minded tool that levels the playing field — giving everyday people the same identity protections that wealthy celebrities can already afford through expensive legal services.
The Hollywood angle reveals fractures: Blanchett called AI potentially "incredibly destructive" while Soderbergh has openly used generative AI in his films. The movement lumps together people with fundamentally different relationships to the technology it's supposed to regulate.
RSL Media launched last month (June 2026) and was co-founded by Blanchett; Soderbergh has used generative AI in "John Lennon: The Last Interview" and an upcoming Spanish-American War film starring Wagner Moura. The EU passed the Artificial Intelligence Act in 2023.
The irony writes itself: celebrities are rallying to protect people from technology they're simultaneously profiting from. When even Hollywood's own can't agree on whether AI is a threat or a tool, who exactly is this registry supposed to serve?
Cate Blanchett stood before the European Parliament last week and made an impassioned case for what she's calling a fundamental human right: control over your own identity in the age of artificial intelligence. The Oscar-winning actress has partnered with RSL Media — "Really Simple Licensing" — a nonprofit she co-founded that launched just last month, promising free protection for anyone's name and likeness against AI scraping. "I know next to nothing about technology," Blanchett admitted to Variety.
"But I know a problem or a challenge when I see one." The problem, apparently, is that AI models are breeding and splintering at such a rate that everyone feels "bamboozled" about where to even start tackling it — her words, not mine. The registry works through a traffic-light system: red means AI is prohibited from using your likeness, yellow means permitted with terms, and green means fully permitted. Users create time-coded identity records with their name, profession, and verification links, generating code readable by AI models scraping the web.
RSL Media has already been introduced to OpenAI and Anthropic — the companies behind ChatGPT and Claude — and has held discussions with SAG-AFTRA about registering members. Blanchett stressed that preschools and universities can use it too. "It's free," she emphasized, apparently aware that not everyone has CAA-level legal budgets to trademark their voice and image like Taylor Swift or Matthew McConaughey have done.
But here's where the narrative gets interesting — and by interesting, I mean complicated in ways the press release doesn't quite capture. Blanchett has previously warned that AI could be "incredibly destructive" to the entertainment industry. Steven Soderbergh, who appeared alongside her at the European Parliament as an RSL Media supporter, has a different relationship with the technology entirely: he's already used generative AI in films like "John Lennon: The Last Interview" and is currently using it on an upcoming Spanish-American War film starring Wagner Moura.
When confronted about Tilly Norwood — one of those fully AI-generated actors everyone's been hearing about — Soderbergh's response was essentially "convince me": "Tell me why it's better to have her than an actor. I'm listening. I just don't know." That's a far cry from the unified front this registry launch would suggest.
Nikki Hexum, RSL Media's co-founder and someone who's been issuing takedown notices for artists whose work gets misused online, put it bluntly: "When the internet was built, nobody was sitting there thinking about, 'Oh, how are we going to decide who owns what?'" She called protecting likenesses "a human right." The organization's star-studded support roster includes Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, and Javier Bardem — all people with enough resources to protect themselves through traditional legal channels.
CAA has signed on as a partner, which means the industry's biggest agency is now invested in whatever regulatory framework emerges from this. Soderbergh framed it as an "elegant solve" that prevents a tiered system where only wealthy people can afford identity protection — but one has to wonder if that's really the crisis requiring celebrity intervention when most people are just trying to figure out whether AI will take their jobs.
