Cate Blanchett Opens Free AI Consent Registry for Identity Rights

Cate Blanchett has co-founded RSL Media, a nonprofit that launched the Human Consent Registry, a free tool that lets anyone in the US or EU declare how AI systems may use their name, image, likeness, voice, and movement. As Gizmodo reported, Blanchett presented the registry at an event hosted at the European Parliament in Brussels by Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell, with director Steven Soderbergh also in attendance.

The registry works like a digital stoplight. After creating an account and providing biographical information and identity markers such as websites or social media profiles, a user picks one of three consent levels: prohibited, permitted with terms, or permitted. That choice gets wrapped into a Human Consent ID that AI systems can query before pulling someone's likeness into training data.

RSL Media's co-founders, Blanchett, Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds, and Eckart Walther, built the tool on top of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) open protocol, which already defines machine-readable AI usage rights for content published by digital outlets. "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 at the launch. The nonprofit plans to extend the registry beyond identity to cover 'Work', 'Characters', and 'Marks' rights areas.

The honest caveat is a significant one: the registry has no enforcement mechanism. AI companies, data vendors, and other organizations are not required to check a Human Consent ID before scraping or training, and compliance is entirely voluntary. Registering also means sharing personal and biographical data with RSL Media itself, a third party.

What the reporting doesn't give you is any named AI company that has committed to honoring the standard, or details on how RSL Media handles user data. The EU Parliament connection is worth watching; if Maydell's political backing translates into regulatory pressure, voluntary could eventually become something closer to mandatory for companies operating under EU law.