Cate Blanchett has co-founded a new non-profit company called RSL Media, a project designed to give artists and other creators a clear way to say whether artificial intelligence can use their work, name and likeness. Tom Hanks is among the advocates and supporters behind the effort, along with George Clooney, Viola Davis, Dame Helen Mirren, Steven Soderbergh, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep, Dame Emma Thompson, Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition.
The center of the plan is the RSL Human Consent Standard, a free public registry that launches in June and allows anyone to declare their AI permissions. RSL Media says the choices work like a traffic light: people can allow use with terms or prohibit it altogether. Blanchett said AI technologies are expanding rampantly, essentially unchecked and unregulated, and said consent must be the first consideration.
Blanchett described RSL Media as the industry’s first practical solution for giving people everywhere control over how their work is used by AI. The company says the registry is meant to give AI systems a universal way to understand consent, which has become one of the sharpest disputes around the use of human expression, creative work and likeness in the digital era.
The new effort comes after Blanchett was among 700 artists, writers and creators who backed an earlier anti-AI campaign this year accusing tech companies of exploiting copyrighted work without permission. That campaign sharpened the pressure on the industry and helped turn a long-running complaint into an organized push for tools that can be used in the real world.
The friction point is simple: AI firms can train on huge volumes of material, but the people who made that work have had few practical ways to signal what is allowed and what is not. RSL Media is trying to fill that gap with a public standard that responsible companies can read, creators can set, and policymakers can use without having to reinvent the rules each time a new system appears.
For Blanchett, the move marks a shift from protest to infrastructure. The question now is not whether the demand for consent has arrived; it is whether the industry adopts a standard fast enough to make that consent visible before more creative work is absorbed without it.
