Event date unknownBrazilMicrosoft text-to-speech (reported)
A professional voice actor sued a São Paulo shopping centre, saying it used the actor's voice without authorisation in a marketing campaign shown on YouTube, and claimed lost earnings and moral damages. The centre answered that the voice was not the actor's but a synthetic voice produced with Microsoft's text-to-speech service, available to the public. According to the legal news site ConJur, a judge of the 18th Civil Court accepted that the voice was produced synthetically and dismissed the claim; on appeal the actor argued that a notarised record attesting to the similarity of the voices had never been assessed. The 6th Private Law Chamber of the São Paulo Court of Justice annulled that judgment for curtailment of the defence, holding that the use of AI does not by itself rule out misuse of third parties' rights, and sent the case back for evidence on how the campaign voice was generated and how similar it is to the actor's. The court docket shows the case back at first instance at the court-expert stage in 2025; no ruling on the merits is reported. Whether the AI voice reproduces the actor's voice is disputed.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026
Nov 2020Event location unknownTikTok text-to-speech
Canadian voice actor Bev Standing alleged in a May 2021 federal suit in New York that ByteDance's TikTok was using her voice, without permission or payment, as the female computer-generated voice of its text-to-speech feature, which lets users choose the words spoken over their videos. Her complaint says she discovered this in November 2020, that the voice came from recordings she had made for the Institute of Acoustics for work described as Chinese translations related to text-to-speech, and that some videos made the voice say foul and offensive language. About three weeks after she sued, users noticed a new female voice on the feature (CBC); TikTok did not comment and never confirmed that the original voice was hers. The case was dismissed in September 2021 after her lawyer reported a settlement, whose terms were not disclosed.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
2020United StatesLovo Genny (reported)
Voice-over actors Paul Lehrman and Linnea Sage allege in a proposed class action in the Southern District of New York that Lovo, a text-to-speech company, hired them through Fiverr in 2019 and 2020 for recordings it said were for internal research or test scripts, then used its AI software to make and sell clones of their voices under the names "Kyle Snow" and "Sally Coleman". According to the complaint as recounted by the court, they learned of it when they heard a podcast narrated in part by a Lovo-generated voice that they say was identical to Lehrman's, and Lovo answered their cease-and-desist letter by saying the characters were created from those recordings and that its use was "fully permissioned". On 10 July 2025 Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed most federal trademark and copyright claims but let their New York Civil Rights Law, consumer-protection and contract claims, and Sage's copyright claim over her original recording, proceed. The case was stayed on 28 May 2026 after Lovo filed a suggestion of bankruptcy. The allegations have not been tested at trial.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026
Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Chinese outlets reported on 29 September 2026, citing the Shanghai courts, that the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court had concluded what it called Shanghai's first voice-rights case arising from AI-synthesised speech. According to the court's account, a voice actor who publishes work on an app learned from a friend in January 2025 that a company appeared to be using the voice actor's voice in an online user-acquisition promotion, judged the audio to be AI-synthesised, had it notarised and sued for 300,000 yuan. The company said the audio was generated by AI it had developed but that the training material could not be confirmed, and denied using the voice actor's voice. A forensic comparison rated about 90 percent of the measured features as fairly or highly similar. The first-instance court awarded 50,000 yuan and both sides appealed. The appeal court held that the company had put an identifiable synthetic voice to commercial use without consent, dismissed the appeals and upheld the award.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026
1 Jul 2024 to 30 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Kenjiro Tsuda, a Japanese voice actor known for roles in Jujutsu Kaisen, sued the operator of TikTok in the Tokyo District Court in November 2025, seeking removal of videos he says use a generative-AI imitation of his voice without permission. According to his complaint, as reported by Jiji Press, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, an account run by an unidentified person posted at least 188 short videos on urban legends, the occult and trivia between July 2024 and September 2025, narrated in a voice modelled on his; the account had about 210,000 followers, videos averaged 1.47 million views, and his side says the poster earned 500,000 to 750,000 yen a month from TikTok's view-based payments. TikTok's operator said the voice was a generic male voice that the poster said came from AI trained on a friend's voice. The poster deleted the account in May 2026. On 30 September 2026 the court held, as a general principle, that a person's voice is a symbol of personality like a likeness and that using a performer's voice without permission solely to exploit its power to attract customers infringes the right of publicity, the first such ruling in Japan. It dismissed the claim because the videos were already gone and TikTok's operator had no remaining duty to delete them, and it did not decide whether these videos infringed his rights (Nikkei; Asahi Shimbun; TV Asahi). His lawyer said they did not plan to appeal.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 7 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026