Actress and MEP Eva Maydell unveiled Human Consent Registry at the European Parliament, a tool that allows anyone to set the terms under which artificial intelligence can use their name, face and voice. RSL Media is the non-profit organization that Cate Blanchett co-founded earlier this year with Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther. Blanchett stood at the European Parliament in Brussels and spoke about the free website that allows anyone to tell AI systems how or if they can use their identity.
The Human Consent Registry tool is RSL Media’s first public product. The launch event was hosted by Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell, of the European People’s Party, and attended by director Steven Soderbergh .
“Your identity is your intellectual property in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it,” Blanchett said.
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The registry, hosted at rslmedia.org, allows a user to tell the AI whether it can use their name, image, voice, likeness and movement. It can also allow it conditionally or prohibit it entirely.
Registration is free for individuals acting on their own behalf and the system also serves third parties such as agents, guilds and administrators who channel requests through an approved route.
RSL Media said the registry should eventually be expanded to include creative works, characters and brands.
Maydell described it as “a tool that makes rights transparent, builds trust, and keeps human creativity at the center of technological progress.”
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Cate Blanchett: Human Consent Registry at the European Parliament
The choice of venue for the Human Consent Registry had its own significance: the Parliament is the place where the EU AI Law, the first comprehensive AI law in the world, was formulated and adopted.
The registry is the latest move in a campaign Blanchett has been waging for over a year. In March 2025, she joined Paul McCartney, Ben Stiller and over 400 artists in an open letter to the Trump administration, urging it not to revoke copyright protections.
This letter directly targeted proposals from OpenAI and Google that argued that US copyright law should allow AI companies to train on protected works without permission or payment, a battle that has only intensified since then.
RSL Media's own launch in May received backing from a long list of Hollywood, including Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep.
“AI technologies are expanding unchecked and unregulated,” Blanchett said in a statement at the time. “For people to stay ahead of these technologies, consent must be the top priority.”
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The complaint addressed by the registry is no longer abstract. Just days before the presentation in Brussels, singer SZA criticized musicians who support what she called “this degenerate nonsense” after discovering that more than 200 of her songs had been fed into AI training sets.
Actor Matthew McConaughey has also trademarked his image and voice, including the phrase “alright, alright, alright.”
What the registry can't do yet is force anyone to comply with it. Its principle is that a clear, machine-readable record of who has consented to have their data used. It's a single place for AI companies to check. The question is whether they will actually check this registry.
