Montana's Anti-Deepfakes Law Just Hit a First Amendment Roadblock

A federal judge found that the state's restrictions on AI-generated political speech likely violate the First Amendment.

States' efforts to regulate election deepfakes keep colliding with the First Amendment.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Watters issued a preliminary injunction preventing Montana from enforcing a 2025 law that restricts AI-generated political advertisements. The law had been challenged by Accountability in State Government, a group run the former state lawmaker Dan Bartel; the organization had sent mailouts containing doctored images of political figures holding pride flags and wearing pronoun badges. 

Under Montana law, it is illegal to sponsor or distribute an election communication within 60 days of voting if you "knew or should have known [it] is a deepfake"—though "satire or parody" is exempt. And so the targets of Bartel's mailouts filed complaints. State Rep. Jennifer Carlson (R–Manhattan), for example, said a mailer showing her holding an AI-generated pride flag was created "with the intent to injure the reputation of the candidate or otherwise deceive a voter."

The complaints were dismissed on August 20, with Christopher Gallus, commissioner of political practices, concluding that the mailers were sufficiently "humorous or outlandish" to qualify as satire. The next morning, Watters heard arguments on Bartel's request to block enforcement of the law altogether on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.

This week, Watters found that Bartel and his group are likely to succeed on their First Amendment challenge. Montana's statute covers synthetic media created "with the intent to injure the reputation" of a candidate or political party, meaning that, as Watters put it, the law "treats identically deceptive media differently based solely on whether its message is weaponized to damage or deployed to elevate a candidate."

Adam Schulman—an attorney at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which is representing Bartel in the case—says that this was the statute's fundamental flaw. "You could have AI deepfakes that were fine as long as they were complimentary," Schulman tells Reason. "You could have Donald Trump dressed in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform deepfake [and that would be] fine because it's not injuring the reputation of a candidate."

Schulman also argues that the law asks regulators to make inherently subjective judgments about political imagery. Montana's statute relies in part on how a "reasonable person" would understand the material, but that becomes difficult when satire and parody are involved. "People have different artistic sensibilities," says Schulman.

Montana is not alone. Plenty of states have attempted to restrict AI-generated political speech and discovered the constitutional difficulty of doing so. After the conservative YouTuber Christopher Kohls posted an AI-produced parody of then–Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, California passed Assembly Bill 2839, prohibiting the distribution of communications "that contains certain materially deceptive content" produced "with malice." In 2025, a federal court ruled the law was unconstitutional and permanently enjoined California from enforcing the law.

Similarly, Hawaii passed Act 191 in 2024, which restricted "materially deceptive" election media. The Babylon Bee and Dawn O'Brien, a Hawaiian resident, challenged the law as a violation of free speech. In January 2026, U.S. District Judge Shanlyn Park granted a summary judgment finding the law "unconstitutionally vague," in part because it "employs ambiguous and subjective standards."

As new technologies develop, calls for more government regulation inevitably ensue. The push to regulate AI-generated political speech reminds Schulman of COVID-era efforts to police "misinformation."

Montana has a month to appeal the decision. But given how things have gone for other states, it might not want to bother. The constitutional limits on regulating AI-generated political speech may not be fully settled, but the early cases have been a warning against attempts to restrict protected political expression.