The House voted 286 to 3 to criminalize undisclosed AI fakes. The Senate is next.
House Bill 9465 covers AI images, video and audio posted without saying they are AI. The penalty runs 6 to 12 years in prison and up to 2 million pesos.
House Bill 9465, the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act, cleared the House of Representatives in June on a vote of 286 to 3. It is now with the Senate. Among the things it covers are AI-generated images, video and audio that get posted without anyone saying they were made by AI.
The penalty is not small. Someone found guilty of knowingly creating, financing, directing or materially assisting false information meant to cause verifiable public harm, or a serious threat to national security, faces 6 to 12 years in prison and fines of up to 2 million pesos.
Why it matters
Right now, posting an AI-made clip of a real person and passing it off as real is mostly a platform problem. Facebook might take it down. Nothing else happens. If this bill becomes law, that same post can carry a prison sentence when it is meant to mislead and it causes real harm. It puts a duty to label AI content into Philippine law for the first time, with jail behind it, and it reaches ordinary posting, not just troll farms. The AI flood photos, the fake endorsement videos, the cloned voice of a public official: all of it sits inside what the bill describes.
The catch to watch
The bill is not law yet, and press groups want it stopped before it is. Their worry is not the intent but the wording, and who ends up deciding what counts as false.
Giving the state the power to determine what is true and what is false is authoritarian. Our fears are not unfounded.
That is Macel Ingles, chairperson of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. Carl Javier, chief AI ethicist at Data and AI Ethics PH, has a separate objection about how the bill is built: "The current bill looks at content. We think the approach should be to look at the behaviour on platforms." His point is that judging posts one by one goes after the symptom, while the machinery that pushes disinformation at scale keeps running. The Senate has not passed its own version, so the final wording can still change.