Who owns your AI likeness after you die: consent, the law by country, and how to keep control in the family

• Three questions decide the matter: did the person consent while alive, who owns the recordings and the model, and who can stop it. Most law answers only the first, and only in some places.

• Post-mortem publicity rights exist in about half of the US states (California for seventy years; New York for forty years since 2021; Tennessee's ELVIS Act of 2024 names voice; Indiana and Oklahoma for a hundred years), in Brazil's Civil Code, in Germany's case law for ten years, and in Israeli and Canadian case law; they do not exist as such in the United Kingdom, Australia or Singapore, where families rely on passing off, contract and consumer law.

• Data-protection law in the EU, the UK, Australia and Singapore stops at death; the EU AI Act's transparency rules (Article 50) require AI-generated likenesses to be labelled from 2 August 2026 regardless.

Consent. Did the person agree, in life, to a likeness being made, for whom, and for what? A likeness made without that is, in most places, a wrong against the family, and in some places a crime: Tennessee's ELVIS Act makes unauthorised voice cloning a civil wrong and, for commercial distribution, a misdemeanour; the UK criminalised sexually explicit deepfakes in 2025; Australia's 2024 deepfake law does the same. Ownership. Who owns the recordings, the transcripts, the voice model and the outputs: the person, their estate, or the platform whose servers they sit on? Read the terms; most consumer platforms claim a broad licence to everything uploaded, and some reserve the right to train on it. Control. Who can change it, who can hear it, and who can end it. A likeness nobody can switch off is not a keepsake, it is a liability the family inherits.

Read the licence clause and the deletion clause. Many consumer AI products take a worldwide, perpetual licence to whatever is uploaded and reserve the right to train on it; most say nothing about death at all, which means the account is governed by the ordinary account terms and the likeness by nobody. Sensay, for example, may archive or delete a replica nobody has opened for 12 months, as our Sensay alternative guide explains. The standard a family should demand is one that answers the three questions in the terms themselves, so that the answer does not depend on the company's goodwill after the person is gone. Here is what ours say. These are quotations from the Executor Lock™ Agreement, version 2026-04-15, which every Persona Owner and their Executor accept in the app, governed by the law of New South Wales.

Executor Lock™ Agreement, version 2026-04-15: what it says

What the Persona is, and whose. "Persona: the AI representation of the Persona Owner, including all associated memories, media, emotional metadata, and governance settings, as it exists at the moment of the Executor Lock™ Event." "Persona Owner: the individual who created the Persona and accepted this Agreement."

Consent and the lock. "The Executor Lock™ is a one-way, cryptographically verified state transition. Once triggered, it is permanent and irreversible. Neither IDY®, the Executor, Trusted Contacts, nor any third party can reverse, modify, or undo the Executor Lock™ Event." "At the moment of the Executor Lock™ Event: the Persona is frozen in its state at that exact moment; all write access to the Persona is permanently blocked at the database level; a cryptographically signed attestation of the Persona's state is generated and stored; governance transitions to the Executor; and Trusted Contact access is activated in accordance with the Persona Owner's pre-configured permissions."

What cannot be done to it. "The Executor does not have authority to modify the Post-Lock Persona's content, memories, or emotional data." "Trusted Contacts do not have authority to modify, export without permission, or commercially use the Post-Lock Persona." "IDY cannot add to, improve, or supplement the Post-Lock Persona after the Executor Lock™ Event."

What IDY will and will not do. "IDY will: maintain the Post-Lock Persona in its frozen state for the agreed retention period; make the Post-Lock Persona accessible to authorised Trusted Contacts within the Executor's governance parameters; provide the Executor with the signed attestation document; maintain the append-only audit ledger of all Post-Lock access events; and apply crisis intervention safeguards to all Trusted Contact interactions." "IDY will not: modify, supplement, retrain, or alter the Post-Lock Persona in any way without the Executor's written consent; use the Post-Lock Persona data for advertising; grant third parties access to the Post-Lock Persona without the Executor's consent."

If the company changes hands or closes. "In the event IDY proposes to discontinue the Platform, IDY will provide at least 12 months notice to the Executor and facilitate full data export. On a business transfer, IDY will use reasonable endeavours to ensure the successor entity assumes the material obligations under this Agreement in respect of existing Post-Lock Personas."

What it does not promise. "AI-generated outputs of the Post-Lock Persona are probabilistic representations based on historical data. They are not guarantees of accuracy, authenticity, or faithful replication of the Persona Owner's views, personality, or voice." "A court order from a New South Wales court or equivalent jurisdiction is required for IDY to override the Executor's governance authority."

Read against the three questions: consent is the Persona Owner's, given in the app, and nobody else can create a Persona of them; ownership of the Persona and its recordings sits with the Persona Owner while alive and with their named Executor's governance after the lock, with the company barred from advertising use, third-party access and alteration; control rests with the Executor, and a court order is needed to override the Executor. A platform that cannot put those sentences in its terms should not have your voice. The 2026 sale of Soul Machines, whose standard terms kept customers' custom avatars as the supplier's property, shows what is at stake when a vendor changes hands.

A clause naming who controls your digital likeness and recordings, with the same care as the executor clause: who may keep it running, who may hear it, who may end it, and what may never be done with it (advertising, commercial use, public release, training). A list of the accounts where recordings exist and how the Executor reaches them. Consent, in writing and ideally in your own recorded words, to the specific likeness you have chosen to make, and an express refusal of any other. Where the country has a publicity right (California, New York, Tennessee and the other US states, Brazil, Germany for ten years, Denmark from 2026), the will can assign it to the person you want to hold it and should, because in California an unregistered and unassigned right passes to the state's default heirs; where it does not, the instruction and the platform's terms do the work, and in the United Kingdom the recordings and the model are now property that the will can leave.

For voice and likeness as assets in an estate, read the intangible estate.

A Persona is made only by the person, from the person, while they are alive and able to consent. Nobody can make one of someone else. After the lock the Persona says only what the person recorded and what follows from it, and cannot be added to, retrained or altered without the Executor's written consent. It is never advertised to the bereaved, never used for advertising, never shared with a third party without the Executor's consent. The Executor can end it. If those commitments read as obvious, that is the point: they are what the law will eventually require, and what a family should require now.