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Last Tuesday, the US Supreme Court released its final merits opinion of its October 2025 term. In Trump v Barbara, a razor thin 5-4 majority deemed the President’s attempt to deny American citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents who are undocumented or present on certain visas unconstitutional. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, held that the order violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14^th Amendment, which mandates that all children born on U.S. soil and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ shall be citizens. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring only in the judgment, would have struck down the order on statutory grounds alone.

The decision is a rare and important win for immigrants and American constitutional democracy. It is rare because the Supreme Court handed the Administration a win in every other immigration enforcement-related dispute it resolved this term. And it is important because it resists one of the Administration’s most aggressive attempts to rewrite not just the country’s immigration laws and Constitution, but also its history and civic identity.

But Barbara should not be remembered as an example of principled judicial resistance against gross executive overreach. Only five Justices affirmed a constitutional rule whose meaning was textually, historically, and precedentially settled. It should, instead, be studied for the disagreement it laid bare over whether citizenship should remain constitutionally insulated from the lawless regime of executive discretion the Court has been crafting when it comes to immigration control — and, beneath that, over what makes citizenship valuable in the first place.

The Executive Order in Context

Trump v Barbara’s constitutional question was whether Executive Order 14160 was compatible with the 14^th Amendment’s citizenship clause. Until last Spring, the consensus was that the Amendment’s language conferred citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil, with a narrow set of exceptions. These pertain to “children of foreign sovereignties or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within or during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and children of members of the Indian tribes.” (United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, 169, U.S. 649, 693 (1898.) With EO 14160, President Trump sought to carve out a new exception for children born to immigrant parents who are present on temporary visas or undocumented.

Proclaiming to protect “the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” the order is part of the Administration’s broader attempt to instantiate a racially exclusive, white nationalist conception of American civic identity and political membership. In pursuit of this project, the executive branch has weaponized the country’s immigration enforcement machinery, and resorted to countless policies and measures that not merely stretch the limits of both statutory and constitutional law but outright ignore them. Its attempt to rewrite the Constitution’s citizenship attribution rule was merely the highest-profile example.

The Supreme Court has, by and large, chosen to legally clear the Administration’s way. The President may now adopt and enforce policies that are motivated by racial animus and ignore the statutorily prescribed process. Agencies tasked with enforcing immigration law may also use racial profiling in law enforcement sweeps, at least for the time being; can detain and deport certain non-citizens without due process and sometimes even basic habeas review; and, since last week, may strip lawful permanent residents seeking re-entry at the border of their green cards on mere suspicion—rather than clear and convincing evidence—that they may have committed a crime.

There is not a single decision by the Supreme Court from its October 2025 term that reined in the executive’s growing lawlessness in its immigration enforcement crackdown. The sole exception being Trump v Barbara, in which two Justices of the Court’s conservative wing split with their ideological allies and chose to side, instead, with the liberals.

On Citizenship Exceptionalism

Why this exception to this general pattern of conservative permissiveness towards executive overreach in immigration enforcement? It reflects, in part, a constitutionally entrenched qualitative distinction between questions of citizenship and immigration control. Constitutionally speaking, the government’s authority over citizenship and immigration are governed by two oppositional constitutional regimes. Since the Supreme Court crafted federal immigration authority in the so-called Chinese Exclusion Cases in the late 19^th century—a series of cases that granted the federal government largely unconstrained power to exclude and deport immigrants—it has treated immigration as a sphere of exceptional political discretion to which the Constitution’s ordinary norms, ideals, and limits simply do not apply. Not just that: it has also condoned racism and nativism as animating governmental concerns in this domain of governmental control.

This exceptionally permissive constitutional regime contrasts with the exceptionally restrictive one that governs the government’s authority over the distribution of citizenship. By attaching citizenship to the fact of territorial birth, the 14^th Amendment’s citizenship clause radically circumscribes the political branches’ capacity to determine who is to be an American citizen. Ratified in 1868, the Amendment was the crowning achievement of the progressive Reconstruction Congress, which sought to constitutionally entrench the civil rights of formerly enslaved people following the country’s civil war. Its drafters both sought to overturn the Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v Sandford, which had held that African-Americans could not be citizens due to their race (Maj. Op., p. 7), and ensure that American citizenship became an “anticaste engine,” rather than a tool for legally entrenching the racial caste system that had disfigured the country’s constitutional and political order since its founding (Maj., p. 9; KBJ, p.15, 17).

The self-executing and near- categorical nature of the Amendment’s citizenship clause laid the foundations for what we may think of the citizenship line: the idea that however expansive the government’s authority over immigration was to be, it does not entail a power to decide who is to be an American in the first place.

History Repeats Itself

Trump v Barbara is not the first time the Supreme Court has had to decide whether it held firm on this line or was willing to subordinate the 14^th Amendment’s text and universalist, anti-caste spirit to the government’s nativism and anti-immigrant agenda. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Court first confronted the question whether the citizenship clause confers citizenship on children born on U.S. soil to resident immigrant parents. Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873 in California to immigrant parents who were subjects of China but not “employed in any diplomatic or official capacity.” When he returned from a temporary visit to China, the government denied him readmission on the basis that he was not a citizen and therefore excludable under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Just like Barbara, Wong Kim Ark was decided amid intense anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Chinese, sentiment, by a Supreme Court that had otherwise been strikingly supportive of the federal government’s attempts to exclude and deport immigrants.

Yet, when the government tried to extend that campaign to citizenship itself, a Court otherwise comfortable with pouring the government’s nativism into the law, found the 14^th Amendment’s “broad and clear” words too clear to bend [704]. It rejected the government’s argument that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” entailed a broad, allegiance-based limitation that would exclude the children of foreign subjects.  It held instead, by 7-2, that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen because he was born on U.S. soil and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Neither his parents’ foreign nationality nor their ineligibility for naturalization altered that fact.

Blurring the Line

Fast forward to today, and this majority has shrunk to a meagre 5-4.

The Barbara majority simply affirmed the long-standing and, until recently, undisputed history and meaning of the Citizenship Clause: to be “subject to the jurisdiction” is to be subject to the government’s “full and complete power” over persons within its territory (Majority, p.3, p.11). The exceptions to this general rule are confined to a narrow category of cases where exercising jurisdiction would “degrade the dignity” of “foreign sovereigns” (Id., citing Schooner Exchange v McFaddon, 7 Cranch 116). Such “inter-sovereign concerns” do not apply to parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States for no sovereign would “have any motive for wishing” them outside the authority of the United States. (Majority, p. 12)

The dissents, by contrast, took up the government’s argument that the Clause’s reference to jurisdiction does not refer to ‘bare territorial authority.’ Instead, it refers to something like ‘complete’ or ‘political’ jurisdiction (Thomas Dissent, p. 3). This, in turn, requires the individual to possess something like ‘primary’ or ‘complete’ or ‘direct and immediate’ allegiance to the U.S. in order to be subject thereto (Alito Dissent, p. 22). Such allegiance exists only if the parents are ‘domiciled’ in the United States; a requirement Wong Kim Ark’s parents satisfied, because they “came to settle in America” and “had done everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans” (Thomas Dissent, p. 43). By contrast, parents present on temporary visas or unlawfully cannot meet this criterion because “by definition, [they] do not choose to make a permanent home here […].” (Gorsuch Dissent, p.2).

Justice Alito goes even further: he believes the clause does not cover all those “subject to a foreign power,” which apparently means simply being a citizen of a different country (Alito Dissent, p. 17). Thus, “children born to illegal immigrants fail this test [if] they are automatically made nationals of their parents’ native country.” (Alito Dissent, p. 37.) Resident non-citizens can only satisfy the Clause’s criterion, in his eyes, if they are “lawfully present, establish the United States as their intended permanent home, and do everything within their power to become United States citizens [emphasis added]” (Alito Dissent, p. 27)—whatever that means.

The Deeper Divide or What Makes Citizenship Valuable

Despite differing in their particulars, the dissents all share a common concern: they all believe that the near-categorical, inclusionary approach to the citizenship clause that the majority affirms supposedly degrades or devalues the “glory and dignity of American citizenship.” (Thomas Dissent, p. 1, 91; Gorsuch Dissent, p.1; Alito Dissent, p. 1). In their eyes, American citizenship is a ‘privilege’ or ‘benefit’ that ought to only be granted to a select class of people (Kavanaugh Concurrence, p.8 ; Gorsuch Dissent, p.2). Extending citizenship to the children of individuals who fall short of some implicit membership criterion—whether it be domicile, lawful immigration status, or allegiance—cheapens the status.

Underpinning this charge is an exclusive, politically defined conception of the citizenry, whose boundaries the political branches must remain free to police. The dissents therefore endorse not merely the government’s legal argument, but also its underlying theory of citizenship, which locates its value in the status’ exclusive and exclusionary nature. On this theory, citizenship cannot and should not be insulated from the President’s authority, because the exclusion the status’ value necessitates requires active policing of access thereto.

This notably contrasts with the majority’s conception of citizenship. Chief Justice Roberts concludes the opinion by noting that “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” (Majority, p. 26). The phrase channels Hannah Arendt’s famous characterization of citizenship which supports the 14^th Amendment’s near categorical, and inclusionary rule of ascription.

On this view, the value and dignity of citizenship flows from its role in securing the ideal of democratic self-rule, by ensuring the inclusion and political voice of all those who are part of the polity by virtue of their territorial presence. This view of citizenship mandates not political discretion over the distribution of citizenship, but instead its widespread conferral upon those subject to the government’s jurisdiction. On this conception, categorical ascription and insulation from political manipulation is not incidental to citizenship’s value but constitutive of it.

The Dark Side of Citizenship Exceptionalism

After oral argument, most commentators were confident that the Court would strike down the Executive Order as unconstitutional. They were right. But most also expected a far more decisive majority than the case produced. That only two Justices from the conservative wing chose to affirm what has been long established law, clear history, and governmental policy is evidence not merely of the ideological corruption of the Court, or, less cynically, the Justices’ divergent approaches to constitutional interpretation. It is also evidence of citizenship exceptionalism’s strategic value to the Court’s own image as a political and politicized actor.

Trump v Barbara was the last decision released by the Court, following a slew of cases that handed the President wins on other key policy goals. Overall, the Court chose to further aggrandize the Presidency’s power at the expense of the Constitution’s rule of law. In upholding a foundational achievement of the Reconstruction Congress—which was a unique historical period in American constitutional history that sought to rectify the nation’s original sin and reaffirm the Constitution’s supposed commitment to egalitarian ideals—the Court can position itself as something other than the anti-constitutional institution it has, in reality, become. It signals to the broader public that it is still doing its supposed job of subjecting executive power to the Constitution’s rule of law, when in reality it is in the business of proactively dismantling it.

The post (De)Valuing Citizenship appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen, a key figure in California’s venture capital scene, coined the phrase: “Software is eating the world.” The phrase describes the spread of software into everyday life and the displacement of physical business models. This process continues in an unexpectedly literal sense: AI companies purchase used books, scan them, and dispose of them to gather input for their models. Anthropic disclosed this practice earlier this year during a court proceeding. As the Washington Post reports: “The document describes how the scanning company’s ‘hydraulic powered cutting machine’ would ‘neatly cut’ books, whose pages would later be ‘scanned on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.’ Finally, it notes, the scanning company will ‘schedule with the recycling company to pick up the completed books.’” In Europe, reports are mounting regarding the purchasing practices of the Canadian company Zoom Books: The online bookstore is acquiring hundreds of thousands of nonfiction titles for which there is no longer a large market, but which represent previously unused material for training models.

The reason for this seemingly cumbersome method is the expectation that it will fall under the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law. It is a new stage of the AI copyright war: There is no flexible instrument such as the fair use doctrine in EU copyright law, but the opt-out structure of the exception and limitation for data mining might make used books fair game. Does one emphasize the creative or the destructive aspect of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”? For some, book-devouring AI training signifies a capitalist fever dream: hungry machines exploiting the work of hundreds of thousands of creators and the cultural heritage of their readers, their billionaire overlords working towards a cyberpunk future known from books like Neuromancer or video games like Cyberpunk 2077. But concerns about the use or abuse of old books are also an indication of the problems facing European culture: The problem is not that Americans buy unwanted books, but that books are more and more unwanted in Europe.

Used Books as Fair Game?

Ownership of a physical copy of a book does not confer the right to reproduce it, neither in the U.S. nor in the EU. But the respective copyright laws use different instruments to balance the interests of rightholders and the public. In the US, this balance hinges on the fair use doctrine  (Section 107 Copyright Act). Whether use without permission is fair depends on four factors, with a strong focus on the questions of how similar the use is to the work being used and whether they compete economically. In the EU, the right to use copyrighted material without the rights holder’s consent depends on whether such use falls under one of the exceptions and limitations set forth in Article 5 Infosoc Directive. It gives preference to certain forms of use but does not allow for an exception on a case-by-case assessment beyond the written catalogue: a gain in legal certainty that comes at the cost of less fairness and flexibility in individual cases.

The debate over the legal limits of book digitization predates AI – it began with Google Books. Google scanned more than 40 million titles without the consent of the authors, although the company later implemented an opt-out clause. The company scanned works in the public domain – whose copyright protection had expired – as well as works that were still fully protected by copyright. Google shows previews of the books online, the corpus also functions as a basis for their Ngram Viewer. Google’s action was adjudicated in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. and deemed to be fair use: “Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use.” While things had quieted down around Google Books, AI companies’ hunger for data has given the topic new significance. AI companies are searching for unused corpora and are well known for having resorted to reckless methods in their search for materials: for example, by using corpora from platforms with questionable copyright compliance, such as Libgen or Anna’s Archive. Recent cases have been decided in favor of Meta and Anthropic. However, these decisions do not amount to a free pass, regardless of how the companies obtained the books. And, more importantly in practical terms: digital pastures have been grazed – physical books are their last frontier.

This raises the question of how the same practice fares under European law: Is the use of copyrighted works, whether digital or physical, illegal in Europe? The digitization of the book (as well as later copies in the learning process) constitutes a reproduction – one of copyright law’s exploitation rights. It is only permitted if it falls under one of the exceptions and limitations of the Infosoc Directive. But there is no such exception or limitation. Alas, Art. 4 of the DSM Directive introduced an exception and limitation for text and data mining. It is now generally accepted that AI training falls under the definition of data mining. Its central feature is that it guarantees creators an opt-out. If they object to the use, the exception and limitation is no help. Anyone who opens a newly printed book will find an opt-out at the beginning. In the case of old books that the AI companies digitized themselves, neither the technological prerequisites for data mining nor the legal option to opt out existed. Therefore, an opt-out is not declared. This applies not only to truly old books, but also to those that are only a few years old but were printed before the DSM Directive introduced the exception and limitation for data mining. Are used books fair game? According to Recital 18, it is possible to declare the opt-out not in the copy but by other means. This gives publishers the ability to prevent even books that have already been published before the DSM Directive from being used for data mining. But some publishers have gone out of business and some authors have passed away. Not every author has a legal department to look after them. Without an opt-out, it all depends on the unclear meaning of the work being “lawfully accessible” (Art. 4 (1) DSM Directive). A wide interpretation is possible on the level of the DSM Directive and its national implementation in Germany. But its compatibility with European and national fundamental rights does not seem self-evident: after all, this involves a significant encroachment on authors’ rights.

The Whimpering of Hollow Men

In America, old books are midwifing the machine god. What about Europe? Lamenting the use of old books as abuse feels like compensatory behavior: Europeans begrudge American machines the books in which they themselves have long since lost interest. We are witnessing an unmitigated crisis of literary culture in publishing, education and politics.

A few examples illustrate the changes that have taken place since the middle of the last century: after Thomas Mann wrote Doctor Faustus while in exile in California, he went on to write a commentary on its creation – a miniature of the literary culture of modernity in which art was high art: difficult, demanding, grand. Today, love stories between werewolves and vampires popularized on TikTok, or cross-selling fantasies like Save Me/Maxton Hall, may generate revenue for publishers and some self-publishers in the young adult category. But only from a philistine’s perspective does reading have value as such. The continued existence of books as a medium masks the cultural rupture. A rupture aided and abetted by the state. Two examples from Germany: students’ reading proficiency continues to decline; according to the IGLU study, one-quarter of elementary school students do not meet the minimum standard. At the same time, classics are being distorted in Berlin schools by being read in so-called “simple language.” This decline in people’s intellectual capacity is reflected by their representatives: during a visit to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, Konrad Adenauer asked President de Gaulle if he could spend an hour alone in his library – to get to know the French politician. Today, former chancellors like Angela Merkel or Olaf Scholz are considered well-educated if, while traveling abroad, they tell journalists that they are reading a book on the history of the country they are visiting. Meanwhile, Thuringia’s Minister President, Mario Voigt, is reported to have his speeches partly generated by AI – even on an issue like the Holocaust. Why bother? He leaves the reading of books to American machines.

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As AI-generated media flood our information ecosystems, detecting synthetic content has become an urgent regulatory challenge – in fact, not one challenge but many, as synthetic media breeds problems across a range of digital contexts, including deepfakes and disinformation, scamming, and content moderation. The EU’s new “Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content” – the first concrete articulation of Article 50(2) AI Act, the EU’s approach to AI-content detection – gives sensible answers to several open questions and will advance the global regulatory debate. Unfortunately, however, it cannot escape the structural shortcoming at the core of Article 50(2): the premise of “general-purpose AI detectability,” which treats detection as a “fixable” technical problem rather than a context-dependent, political one demanding iterative, multi-actor coordination. That diagnosis points towards a different response: rethinking synthetic-media regulation, and kindred problems of internet governance, around institutionalized, regulator-led forums that oblige stakeholders to keep communicating and collaborating.

Synthetic Content Transparency: Article 50 AI Act and the EU’s new Code of Practice

Establishing AI detectability is no simple problem: it has to deal with a quickly evolving technological landscape and a range of diverse actors – AI developers, platforms, researchers and more – whose interests only partly overlap. Fortunately, regulators have nonetheless begun to act, adopting legislation to help increase synthetic media detection capabilities. One of these regulators, alongside China and India, is the EU, which, in Article 50(2) AI Act, obliges “[p]roviders of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, [to] ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated”. Furthermore, “[p]roviders shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible”.

With the adoption of the “Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content” on 10 June 2026 – a guidebook developed by appointed, yet independent academic experts together with over 100 stakeholders from industry, academia and civil society – these obligations have now found a concrete articulation. The Code of Practice lays down a framework of commitments and measures – some of which obligatory, some optional – that can prove adherence to Article 50(2). If the Commission approves the Code, which seems likely, adherence to the Code will create a presumption of compliance with Article 50(2). Although providers are also free to adopt their own, alternative compliance strategies, the legal certainty provided by this presumption will in all probability confer high practical relevance on the Code.

As the remainder of this contribution argues, the Code, for all it gets right, exhibits a number of questionable blindspots and, perhaps inevitably, fails to overcome the structural shortcoming at the core of Article 50(2).

What the Code gets right

One aspect that will be central to the success of any AI detectability strategy is the issue of technical implementation. Synthetic media can only be detected if appropriate technical tools are available to successfully identify AI generations. The issue is a complex one: it is unlikely that concerned actors will ever possess technologies that can ensure a robust marking of all covered forms of synthetic media; as of today, they don’t. The Code obliges AI providers to implement at least two layers of machine-readable marking, focusing on the currently dominant approaches of metadata addition and imperceptible watermarking. However, it also calls on providers to continually test and overhaul their tools to at least attempt to maintain effectiveness and robustness vis-a-vis evolving adversarial challenges – a generally convincing approach.

The Code also takes several welcome steps to advance the coordination between AI developers and other actors involved in content propagation and consumption, which is pivotal to the (inherently collaborative) project of synthetic media detectability. These include the duty for AI providers to prohibit users, through their acceptable use policies, from intentionally removing or tampering with markings and encouraging them to “collaborate with relevant actors within the ecosystem to make their detection solution directly available within distribution and communication platforms”. While this does not reach the level of integration implemented by China’s regulation on AI content transparency, which extends marking and labelling duties to providers of generative AI systems as well as platform intermediaries and end users, it still marks a significant, if tentative, step toward the cross-actor coordination on which synthetic media detectability depends.

The blindspots

Unfortunately, the Code also suffers from a number of blindspots. First of all, it insufficiently considers that any successful AI detection strategy needs to have special consideration for the problem of malicious actors. Whereas AI slop and other “innocent” synthetic media propagation have risks, the dangers posed by malicious actors willing and able to strategically bypass detection mechanisms (e.g. for disinformation) are not only more grave, but also harder to mitigate. Synthetic media identification, therefore, is structured by what has adequately been called a “detection dilemma”: the more broadly accessible a detection technology becomes, the more easily it can be circumvented. This dynamic is compounded by an asymmetry of cost and effort: producing convincing synthetic media has already become incredibly cheap and fast, while marking and detecting it remains technically demanding and expensive. While the Code is not blind to this dynamic and the related insight of an “AI detection arms race”, its default is broad public availability: detection solutions are to be made available to the general public, free of charge, with encouragement toward open specifications. Staggered access, i.e. restricting detection to (verified) high-stakes users while accounting for security and equity concerns, is reserved for the case of free-form text watermarking. The result is a posture of “default public access” for the high-fidelity modalities (photo, video, audio) where determined bad actors stand to gain the most.

What is more, the Code prematurely discounts the value of passive, forensic AI detection tools, by treating them as a purely optional measure rather than a potential compliance necessity.

The Code is right in highlighting the current unreliability of forensic AI detection tools and their inferiority to active marking technologies. However, especially against malicious actors, which can strip synthetic media of embedded detection signals or make use of systems that do not apply them in the first place, forensic detection tools can be the only remedy. Forensic detection arguably fits poorly within the AI Act’s provider-centric design: developing synthetic content identifiers, in particular model-agnostic ones, is a duty one could just as readily locate with content propagators, as is the case under India’s new intermediary-centric regulation on AI detection. However, as actors with highly privileged insight into the characteristics and telltales of AI generations, AI systems providers, especially large ones, are well-equipped to share in the responsibility to build effective forensic detection tools.

A deeper misconstruction – and a way forward

These shortcomings ultimately reflect a deeper misconstruction at the core of the AI Act’s approach to synthetic media detectability. Article 50(2) prescribes a horizontal, uniform, one-sided, risk-agnostic, technical “fix” to what in reality are diverse issues of digital deception, the responses to which are necessarily context-dependent and “political” and require collaboration and coordination between a number of different actors, including AI systems providers, intermediaries, public authorities, researchers and NGOs. The Code even attempts to inspire such networking – encouraging AI providers to “foster collaboration” with deployers and users of their systems – but of course is formally reined in by the silo of “AI regulation”. Whether these synapses will be established by other regulations, e.g. the DSA’s obligations on platform and search engine providers, is an open question, but seems dubious. Unfortunately, the structure of Article 50(2) and its too broad, and therefore too narrow, perspective of ‘general-purpose AI detectability’ seem to have prevented the Code of Practice from engaging with the work that actually matters: sensibly delineating which forms of AI-generated content are genuinely deceptive, and devising the nuanced, socio-technical responses capable of countering them.

These insights might help inform future legislation. They also point to a potentially more effective and sustainable method for addressing multi-actor digital governance issues, namely one that recognizes that many such issues, including synthetic media harms, cannot be discharged once and for all by a discrete techno-regulatory intervention, but rather require continuous and evolving multi-party collaboration. Such a framework could be set up through an institutionalized, regulator-led forum that obliges the relevant actors to communicate and collaborate, and in which decisions regarding e.g. the development of and access to detection technologies are regularly revisited in light of evolving real-world problems and priorities. The Code makes a first, rudimentary step in that direction, by announcing a “taskforce … to facilitate … collaboration between Signatories, other actors in the value chain and relevant stakeholders through regular meetings”, which Signatories are “encouraged” to participate in. Yet, if the preceding analysis is correct, such a forum belongs at the core of synthetic media regulation, not in an optional taskforce.

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