What is identity licensing?

Identity licensing is permission from a real person to use their face or voice in AI-generated content. The permission is agreed before anything is made, and it is provable after.

Two things have to be true at once for that sentence to mean anything. The person has to have agreed in advance, to a scope they actually chose. And somebody who was not in the room has to be able to check that a specific piece of content was covered by that agreement, without taking anyone's word for it.

Most of what gets called consent in AI content only does the first half. A signed release in a folder says permission existed somewhere. It cannot tell you whether the video in front of you was covered by it.

What is in a licence

A licence is not a yes or a no. It is a scope, agreed before anything is generated:

Duration is the one that separates a licence from a sale. A brand never buys an identity. When the licence ends, their right to use that person ends with it.

What it is not

Not thisBecause
A model release A release is a document about a person. A licence is attached to specific content, so you can check the content rather than trust a filing cabinet.
A stock likeness Stock is bought once and used anywhere. A licence is scoped to a brand, campaign, format, territory and duration, and it expires.
A deepfake takedown service A takedown is what you do after something unauthorized exists. A licence is the record that makes authorized use provable in the first place. We are the legal path, not the police.
A watermark A watermark can say content is synthetic. It does not say who agreed to appear in it, under what terms, or whether those terms have expired.
A blockchain Entries are hash-chained and anchored to an external timestamp authority. That gives you an independently checkable record without a token or a chain.

The receipt is the point

Every authorized generation carries a receipt, and a receipt links five things: the person, the asset, the licence, the generation, and the credential. That chain is what lets somebody who does not trust us establish that a piece of content was authorized, and when that authorization ran out.

The verifier is public. It runs on your own machine, with no account and no dependencies, and the source of the verifier is published too, so a sceptic can check the checker instead of trusting the result. It returns three outcomes rather than two: pass, fail, and unknown. Unknown is reported as unknown, because a verifier that rounds uncertainty into a yes is worse than no verifier at all.

Check a receipt yourselfSee how it works

Common questions

How is this different from a model release?

A model release sits in someone's files and says permission was given. It cannot tell you whether the specific video in front of you was covered by it, and nobody outside the two parties can check it. An identity licence is scope-bound and machine-readable, and each generation made under it carries a receipt that links the content back to the licence.

Is this the same as a deepfake?

No, and the difference is consent and evidence. A deepfake is made without permission and carries nothing that proves anything about where it came from. A licensed generation exists because the person agreed to it in advance, inside a scope they set, and it carries a receipt showing what was authorized, by whom, and when that ended.

Who owns the likeness?

The person does. Their face and voice stay theirs. Brands license, they do not buy.

What happens when the licence expires?

The right to use the person ends. Because the duration is part of the licence and the receipt points back to it, an expired use is checkable by anyone rather than being an argument between two parties.

How do I know a specific AI video was licensed?

Take it to the verifier. One command, no account, and it runs on your machine.

Can somebody be listed without agreeing?

No. Nobody is onboarded, cloned or listed before they say yes, and consent of record is a signed agreement plus a passed identity check, not a recorded verbal statement. A signed document has a hash a third party can check. A video of somebody saying yes does not.