ElevenLabs Voice Cloning & Pricing 2026: Consent, NO FAKES

Updated October 2026: Eleven v4 models and lower API rates ($0.08 / $0.04 per 1,000 characters); the NO FAKES Act of 2026 (S.4591) cleared Senate Judiciary; EU Article 50 now applies, with a 2 December 2026 marking deadline for existing generators.

Why This Matters

If your product reads text aloud, dubs a video, or lets a user hear their own synthetic voice, you will almost certainly evaluate ElevenLabs, and you will need to answer three questions before a single line of code ships. What will it cost at your real volume? What can you legally clone, and how do you prove you had permission? And what must you disclose to the listener and to regulators? This article is for the product manager, founder, or engineering lead making a build-or-buy decision on synthetic voice. By the end you will understand the full 2026 pricing ladder and where it bites, the difference between an instant and a professional clone and the consent each one demands, and the two regulatory regimes — one American and advancing in Congress, one European and already in force — that turn "we cloned a voice" into either a feature or a lawsuit.

The short answer, as of October 2026: ElevenLabs voice cloning starts on the $6/month Starter plan, which unlocks Instant Voice Cloning and a commercial licence; Professional Voice Cloning needs the Creator plan ($22/month, $11 for the first month) or higher (ElevenLabs pricing, October 2026). ElevenLabs lets you build a Professional Voice Clone only of your own voice: anyone else creates and verifies the clone on their own account and shares it with you (ElevenLabs Help Center, 2026). On the API, speech costs $0.08 per 1,000 characters on the Multilingual v2 and v3 models and $0.04 on the Flash and Turbo models (ElevenAPI pricing, October 2026).

What ElevenLabs Actually Sells

Start with the product, because the pricing only makes sense once you know what you are paying for. ElevenLabs is a company that turns text into spoken audio using machine-learning models, a job called text-to-speech, abbreviated TTS. It also does the harder job of voice cloning — building a synthetic copy of a specific person's voice so that new sentences can be generated in that voice. Think of plain text-to-speech as hiring a generic narrator, and voice cloning as hiring an impersonator who can say anything in a particular person's voice.

The voice itself is produced by a model, and ElevenLabs ships several. Since 28 September 2026 its flagship is Eleven v4, which supports more than 90 languages and, by the company's own report, ranked first on the Artificial Analysis voice arena in September 2026; its real-time sibling, Eleven v4 Turbo, reached a median time to first speech of about 150 ms in ElevenLabs' September 2026 tests (ElevenLabs, 2026). The older v3 model (70+ languages) and the faster, cheaper "Flash" and "Turbo" models stay available for real-time use where a half-second delay would break the experience. Cloned voices can sound different when you move them to a new model, so re-listen to every clone after a model switch. You do not need to memorise the model names. The point to carry forward is that quality, speed, and price trade against each other: the expressive model costs more credits per character, the fast model costs fewer and answers quicker.

Everything you generate is metered in credits. A credit is ElevenLabs' unit of consumption, and for the standard multilingual models the rule is simple: one text character — a single letter, space, or punctuation mark — equals one credit (ElevenLabs Help Center, 2026). The faster Flash and Turbo models are discounted: they cost half a credit per character (ElevenLabs Help Center, 2026). Credits, not dollars, are what each plan hands you, so the whole pricing question reduces to "how many credits do I get, and how many does my product burn?" Convert credits to characters, then to minutes of audio, before comparing plans — almost every costing mistake starts with reading the big credit number as if it were words.

The 2026 Pricing Ladder, Tier By Tier

ElevenLabs sells seven tiers in 2026, from a free plan to a custom enterprise contract. The prices below were read from the company's own pricing page in May 2026 and re-checked on 15 October 2026, when the tiers and list prices were unchanged; that page is the source of truth — third-party blogs frequently quote stale figures (ElevenLabs, 2026). The table is the map. Read it as a ladder of credits and rights, not just prices — the jump that matters most for most teams is not a price jump but a rights jump.

*Creator lists at $22/month with the first month at 50% off ($11). Starter lists at $6 and sometimes carries a short first-month promotion (in October 2026, $1 until 18 October). Source: ElevenLabs pricing page, re-read 2026-10-15. Minute figures are the page's own "minutes included" conversions on the standard Multilingual model; the Flash and Turbo models stretch each plan to roughly double the minutes. Annual billing saves roughly two months.

Two limits sit outside the table. Each paid tier caps how many custom voices you can keep — 10 on Starter, 30 on Creator, 160 on Pro, 660 on Scale and 2,200 on Business — and usage past the monthly credits is billed at roughly $0.18 per extra minute on Creator and $0.17 on Pro and above (ElevenLabs pricing page, October 2026).

Two lines in that table deserve a closer look because they trap teams.

The first trap is the free plan. It gives you 10,000 credits a month — about ten minutes of speech — and it is genuinely useful for prototyping, but it grants no commercial rights and no voice cloning (ElevenLabs, 2026). You cannot legally monetise anything you generate on it, and any public content must credit ElevenLabs. A team that builds a demo on the free tier, likes it, and ships it has quietly broken the licence. The cheapest plan that lets you use the audio commercially is Starter at $6 a month, and that is the line a real product crosses first.

The second trap is the Creator plan. It is the first tier that unlocks professional voice cloning, the high-quality kind, and it is the plan most teams that evaluate cloning end up on (ElevenLabs, 2026). Starter, one step below, only gives you the lower-fidelity instant clone. So the practical entry point for a serious voice feature is the Creator plan, not Starter — a distinction worth getting right in a budget before anyone is surprised.

Figure 1. The 2026 plan ladder. The two thresholds that catch teams are the commercial-rights line at Starter ($6) and the professional-cloning line at Creator ($11 first month, $22 after).

A Worked Example — What 200 Minutes A Month Really Costs

Numbers make this concrete. Suppose your product narrates articles and generates 200 minutes of speech a month using the standard multilingual model. The simplest way to price this at volume is the API list rate of $0.08 per 1,000 characters for Multilingual v2 and v3, as of October 2026 (it was $0.10 in May 2026). At about 150 words per spoken minute and six characters per word:

200 minutes × 150 words/minute = 30,000 words per month
30,000 words × 6 characters/word = 180,000 characters per month
180,000 characters ÷ 1,000 = 180 thousand-character units
180 units × $0.08 = about $14.40 per month, on the API

Now compare that against the subscription. The Creator plan includes 121,000 credits — roughly 121 minutes — for $22 a month after the first month, so 180,000 characters would exceed it by about 59,000 credits — about 59 of ElevenLabs' own 1,000-credit "minutes", which are slightly longer than our 900-character spoken minute. You either pay overage on Creator or jump to the Pro plan at $99 for 600,000 credits, most of which you would not use:

Creator + overage: $22 + ~59 extra minutes × ~$0.18 ≈ $33 per month
Pro plan: $99 for ~600 minutes → 200 used, ~400 to spare (a lot of waste)

For this volume the API (~$14) beats both the Creator overage (~$33) and the jump to Pro ($99). The lesson generalises: the subscription is priced for steady, predictable consumption, while the API is priced per unit and wins when your usage is modest or spiky. Model your real monthly minutes, convert them to characters, then compare the API rate against the cheapest subscription that covers you — the answer flips with volume. Switching to the faster Flash model halves the per-character cost ($0.04 per 1,000) and moves the break-even again.

Instant Versus Professional Voice Cloning

Voice cloning on ElevenLabs is not one feature but two, and confusing them is the most common planning error we see. They differ in how much audio they need, how long they take, how good they sound, and — this is the part that matters for the law — how hard they make it to clone someone without permission.

An Instant Voice Clone, or IVC, is the fast, lightweight option. It builds a usable copy of a voice from a short sample: around thirty seconds of clear audio can work, and ElevenLabs' current documentation says less than two minutes produces a usable clone — and the clone is ready in seconds (ElevenLabs voice cloning, 2026). The reason it is instant is worth knowing: it does few-shot adaptation, handing your recording to the model as a live reference at the moment of speaking — "sound like this" — without retraining anything. Picture a skilled mimic who hears a short clip and imitates it on the spot. It is available from the $6 Starter plan. The trade-offs follow from the mechanism: its quality ceiling is set by that one reference clip, so background noise carries through; it generalises less well when asked for a very different emotion than the sample; and it carries a lighter consent gate than the professional route — you confirm you have the right to clone the voice (ElevenLabs voice cloning, 2026).

A Professional Voice Clone, or PVC, is the high-fidelity option, and it works differently underneath. Instead of using your audio as a hint at speaking time, PVC fine-tunes the model — it actually adjusts the model's internal settings to represent the target voice more deeply, the way an actor studies hours of footage until they can become a person in any mood (ElevenLabs voice cloning, 2026). It needs about thirty minutes of high-quality audio, recording quality matters more because flaws are baked into the settings, and it takes minutes rather than seconds to build. It requires the Creator plan ($22/month, $11 for the first month) or higher, reflecting the compute it consumes. And before it will proceed, ElevenLabs makes you pass a voice-CAPTCHA: the app shows you text and you must read it aloud within a time limit, then the system compares that live recording against the samples you uploaded to confirm the voice is genuinely yours (ElevenLabs voice cloning, 2026). That recorded read-aloud is consent engineering built into the product — it makes cloning a stranger from stolen audio far harder, because you would have to reproduce their voice live on demand.

The official policy on cloning someone else is short: you cannot build a Professional Voice Clone of another person's voice on your account, and that person's permission does not change it. If a narrator, presenter or customer wants you to use their voice, they create and verify the professional clone on their own ElevenLabs account and share it with you privately through a sharing link (ElevenLabs Help Center, 2026). Even then the voice-CAPTCHA only confirms who was present at the microphone; ElevenLabs states it cannot guarantee the recording belongs to the requester, and the duty to have permission stays with you (ElevenLabs voice cloning, 2026).

Figure 2. Instant versus professional cloning. The professional clone trades speed for fidelity and adds a recorded voice-CAPTCHA that an instant clone does not require.

The practical routing is clear. Use an instant clone for low-stakes, high-volume, fast-turnaround needs — a user previewing their own voice, a quick draft narration. Use a professional clone for the voice your product depends on — a brand narrator, a named presenter, a recurring character — where the extra fidelity and the stronger verification both pay off. And in either case, the consent box and the CAPTCHA are ElevenLabs protecting itself; they do not discharge your legal duty to have permission, which the next sections cover.

How ElevenLabs Polices Misuse

Before the law, there is the platform's own policy, and it is stricter than most teams expect. ElevenLabs runs several layers of defence against voice misuse, and understanding them tells you what you can and cannot build (ElevenLabs safety, 2026; ElevenLabs use policy, 2026).

The first layer is the voice-CAPTCHA already described, which gates professional cloning behind a live read-aloud. The second is automated blocking of high-risk voices: the platform detects and refuses attempts to clone celebrities, politicians, and other public figures, with extra vigilance around political figures during election periods to prevent fabricated campaign audio (ElevenLabs safety, 2026). The third is ongoing content moderation — a mix of AI classifiers, human reviewers, and internal investigations that watch for violations of the Prohibited Use Policy (ElevenLabs safety, 2026). On top of these, accounts can carry live moderation that restricts which categories of content a given voice may be used for.

The Prohibited Use Policy itself bans the obvious harms: impersonating a person to defraud, voter suppression, impersonating political candidates or officials whether or not you claim authorisation, and other deceptive or harmful uses (ElevenLabs use policy, 2026). For a product team, the takeaway is that ElevenLabs will not be a willing partner in cloning a public figure or running a political impersonation, and designing a feature that depends on either will hit a wall in moderation, not just in court.

There is also a constructive side to this. ElevenLabs runs a Voice Library where voice owners can list their voice and earn payouts when others use it — a marketplace that turns consent into a revenue stream rather than a checkbox (ElevenLabs payouts, 2026). If your product needs a distinctive voice and you do not have one to clone, licensing from this library is the clean path: consent and compensation are handled by the platform.

The NO FAKES Act — A Federal Right Over Your Voice

Now the law. The most consequential piece of proposed U.S. legislation for anyone building voice features is the NO FAKES Act — the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act — first introduced in 2024, reintroduced in April 2025 as S.1367 and H.R.2794, and reintroduced again in May 2026 as the NO FAKES Act of 2026, S.4591 in the Senate and H.R.8915 in the House (Coons, 2025; Salazar, 2026). In June 2026 the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced S.4591 by a unanimous vote, and it now waits on the Senate calendar; the House bill has not been marked up (Salazar, 2026; S&P Global, 2026). As of October 2026 it is still a bill, not a law. If it passes, most provisions take effect 180 days after enactment. It is the clearest signal of where U.S. rules are heading, and SAG-AFTRA, the RIAA, OpenAI, Google, Disney and Adobe have backed it (Coons, 2025).

What the bill would do is create the first-ever federal right over a person's voice and visual likeness, what it calls a digital replica right (Manatt, 2025). A digital replica, in the bill's words, is a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic representation that is readily identifiable as a specific person's voice or visual likeness (Congress.gov S.1367, 2025). Today, whether you can sue over an unauthorised voice clone depends on a patchwork of state right-of-publicity laws; the NO FAKES Act would set a national floor.

The mechanism most relevant to a product team is the notice-and-takedown system, deliberately modelled on the copyright takedown regime that platforms already know from the DMCA (Manatt, 2025). The bill does not impose a general duty to scan for unauthorised replicas, although the 2026 text expects a user-upload service to also remove later uploads that match the digital fingerprint of a replica it was notified about. A service that hosts user content gains a safe harbor — protection from liability — if, on receiving a valid notice, it promptly removes the offending replica, and if it has registered a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office and adopted a policy for terminating repeat offenders (Manatt, 2025). This is the same shape as copyright safe harbor, so if your platform already runs a DMCA process, you have the template.

The penalties are why this is not a footnote. In the 2026 text, statutory damages run from $5,000 to $25,000 per unauthorised replica, depending on who made it, and a platform that makes no good-faith effort to comply faces far more — so a single viral clip can multiply fast (ByteBack Law, 2026). To balance that, sending a knowingly false takedown notice carries its own $25,000 penalty, which is meant to deter abuse of the takedown system (GovTrack S.1367, 2025). The bill also sets up postmortem rights — the voice right survives death for an initial 10 years, renewable up to 70 years, through a Copyright Office registration system — and it does not preempt state digital-replica laws in effect on 2 January 2025 or state laws on sexually explicit and election-related replicas, so Tennessee's ELVIS Act and similar state statutes survive alongside it (ByteBack Law, 2026).

It is not without critics. Digital-rights groups including the EFF and FIRE warn that a broad new right over likeness could chill lawful speech — parody, commentary, journalism — and the bill has been revised partly in response (EFF, 2024). For your purposes, the prudent posture is to design as if a notice-and-takedown duty and a strong consent expectation are coming, because the direction of travel is clear even if the final text is not.

The EU AI Act, Article 50 — Disclosure Is Already In Force

If the NO FAKES Act is the future you should prepare for, the EU AI Act's Article 50 is already the law: its transparency obligations have applied since 2 August 2026 (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026). The Digital Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, published in the Official Journal on 24 July 2026, gave one extension: providers of generative systems placed on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026 to meet the Article 50(2) marking duty. The deployer's deepfake disclosure under Article 50(4) was not delayed, and content generated before 2 August 2026 does not need retroactive labelling (ActuIA, 2026; Paul, Weiss, 2026). Unlike the high-risk rules elsewhere in the Act, Article 50 reaches every generative AI system, which expressly includes tools that synthesise audio (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026).

Article 50 splits its duty between two roles. If you are a provider — the entity that makes the generation system, which is ElevenLabs' role — you must ensure the synthetic audio you output is marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated, for example by an embedded provenance signal or watermark (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026). If you are a deployer — the entity that uses such a system to produce a deepfake for an audience, which is often your role — you must disclose to people that the content was artificially generated or manipulated (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026).

There are limited carve-outs. Where the content is plainly artistic, satirical, or fictional, the disclosure duty is softened to an unobtrusive acknowledgement that does not spoil the work, and law-enforcement uses are exempt (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026). The European Commission published its final Article 50 guidelines on 20 July 2026, next to a Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content that around 190 organisations had signed by 31 July 2026; the Code asks providers to use at least two machine-readable marking techniques and deployers to label deepfakes (Paul, Weiss, 2026). For a product serving EU users, the engineering implication is concrete: build a disclosure surface — a visible label, a spoken or written "AI-generated" notice — into any feature that outputs a cloned or synthetic voice, and rely on the provider's machine-readable marking for the provenance half.

A Common Mistake — Treating The Consent Checkbox As Legal Cover

The single most damaging error we see is a team assuming that because ElevenLabs made them tick "I have the right to clone this voice", their legal duty is discharged. It is not. That checkbox protects ElevenLabs under its own terms; it does nothing to give you the permission the law requires from the actual person whose voice you cloned. If you clone an employee's voice for an internal training video and they later object, or clone a freelance narrator without a clause covering synthetic reuse, the platform's checkbox is no defence.

The fix is to engineer consent as a record, not a click. For any voice you clone, capture and store explicit, written, scoped permission from the person: what voice, for what uses, for how long, and with what right to revoke. Treat it the way you treat a signed model release in photography. Where a contract is involved — a voice actor, a presenter, an employee — add an explicit clause covering synthetic voice generation, its permitted uses, and compensation, because a generic appearance release written before voice cloning existed almost never covers it. This consent record is also what lets you respond cleanly to a NO FAKES-style takedown notice: you can show the permission instead of scrambling.

How To Decide — Five Questions

The decision comes down to five questions, in order.

First, do you need a specific person's voice, or just a good voice? If any natural-sounding narrator will do, skip cloning entirely and use a stock or library voice — it is cheaper, faster, and carries no consent risk.

Second, what is your real monthly volume in minutes? Model it, convert to credits, and compare base-plus-overage against the next plan up. The cheapest plan flips with volume, and the Flash model can move the break-even.

Third, instant or professional clone? Use instant for low-stakes, fast, high-volume previews; professional for the voice your product leans on, where fidelity and the voice-CAPTCHA verification both matter.

Fourth, can you prove consent? For every cloned voice, hold explicit, written, scoped permission from the person, with a synthetic-voice clause in any contract. The platform's checkbox is not enough.

Fifth, do you serve EU users or expect U.S. rules to tighten? If yes, build the disclosure surface for Article 50 now and design your hosting flow for a NO FAKES-style notice-and-takedown, so compliance is a feature you already have rather than a fire drill later.

Figure 3. Five questions, asked in order, route most synthetic-voice projects to the right plan and the right consent design.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does ElevenLabs voice cloning cost?

Instant Voice Cloning starts on the $6/month Starter plan with 30,000 credits; Professional Voice Cloning starts on the Creator plan at $22/month ($11 for the first month) with 121,000 credits, and Pro ($99), Scale ($299) and Business ($990) add more credits and professional clones (ElevenLabs pricing, October 2026). The free plan includes no cloning.

Can I clone someone else's voice on ElevenLabs?

Not as a Professional Voice Clone: ElevenLabs only lets you build a professional clone of your own voice, even with the other person's permission. The voice owner creates and verifies the clone on their own account and shares it with you (ElevenLabs Help Center, 2026).

Does ElevenLabs allow commercial use?

Yes, on every paid plan from Starter ($6/month) upwards; the free plan has no commercial licence and requires attribution (ElevenLabs pricing, October 2026).

Which voice cloning services allow commercial use?

Most commercial voice-cloning services, ElevenLabs included, grant commercial rights only on paid tiers, so check two things in each vendor's terms: that the plan includes a commercial licence and that you hold written consent from the person whose voice you clone. On ElevenLabs that means Starter or above.

What consent is required before cloning a real person's voice for an AI agent?

Explicit, written, scoped permission from that person: which voice, for which uses, for how long, with a right to revoke, plus a synthetic-voice clause in any contract. The platform's checkbox or voice-CAPTCHA does not replace it, and in the EU the listener must also be told the voice is AI-generated (EU AI Act Article 50, 2026).

Is the NO FAKES Act law?

No. As of October 2026 the NO FAKES Act of 2026 (S.4591) has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and waits for a Senate floor vote; the House version (H.R.8915) is still in committee.

When must AI-generated audio be labelled in the EU?

Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026. Deployers must disclose deepfakes now; providers of generative systems already on the market before that date have until 2 December 2026 to add machine-readable marking (Regulation (EU) 2026/1744).

Where Fora Soft Fits In

We build voice features into the video products our clients ship, and the choice of voice engine and the consent design around it come up on most of them. We have wired synthetic and cloned voices into e-learning courses that need a consistent narrator across hundreds of lessons, telemedicine tools that read instructions aloud, OTT platforms that auto-dub catalogue content, and video conferencing features that voice live captions. The recurring lesson is that the model is the easy part. The hard part is the surrounding engineering: modelling cost at real monthly volume rather than the headline price, choosing instant versus professional cloning per use case, capturing and storing scoped consent so a takedown notice can be answered in minutes, and building the AI-generated disclosure that Article 50 now requires for EU audiences. We design the consent and disclosure layer first, then pick the engine, because a voice feature that cannot prove permission is a liability no matter how good it sounds. Engine choice, cloning and consent capture are part of our custom text-to-speech and voice cloning development, and auto-dubbing pipelines draw on our AI language interpretation work with ElevenLabs voiceover in 100+ languages. When the cloned voice has to hold a live conversation rather than read a script, our AI chatbot and voice assistant development team wires the licensed voice into the agent and the disclosure into its first sentence.

The book

AI for Video: A Complete Guide to Intelligence in Video Products: From Real-Time Pipelines and Agents to Serving, Cost, Compliance, and Verticals

This article models one vendor's bill and one consent record; volume 7 of the Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook does both at product scale — what a model costs per stream-hour once thousands of sessions run through it, and how the EU AI Act, C2PA provenance and biometric rules land on a product that speaks. Volume 6 sits underneath it with the speech stack itself: text-to-speech, ASR and diarization, and what each one can and cannot do. Together they are the two volumes closest to this article, inside a seven-volume series that takes the video stack apart from the pixel to production. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.

Read it on Amazon →Kindle & paperback · Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook

See our case studies

References

1. ElevenLabs. Pricing for Creators & Businesses of All Sizes, accessed 2026-05-31 and re-checked 2026-10-15 (tiers and list prices unchanged; Starter $1 first-month promotion until 18 October 2026; custom voice slots 10 / 30 / 160 / 660 / 2,200 on Starter to Business; extra minutes about $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 on Pro and above). https://elevenlabs.io/pricing. Primary first-party source for the seven 2026 plan tiers and their prices read directly from the vendor page (Free $0 / 10k credits; Starter $6 / 30k; Creator $11 first month then $22 / 121k; Pro $99 / 600k; Scale $299 / 1.8M / 3 seats / 3 PVCs; Business $990 / 6M / 10 seats / 10 PVCs; Enterprise custom with HIPAA BAA and SSO), the per-tier "minutes included" conversions, the commercial-licence and instant-cloning unlock at Starter, the professional-cloning unlock at Creator, and the annual-billing discount. Where third-party blogs quoted different figures (Starter $5, Creator 100k, Scale $330 / 2M, Business $1,320 / 11M), the vendor page governs and those secondary figures were discarded.
2. ElevenLabs Documentation. Voice cloning: how it works, accessed 2026-05-31. https://elevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-api/concepts/voice-cloning (re-checked 2026-10-15). First-party source for the technical distinction between the two cloning modes — Instant Voice Cloning as few-shot conditioning at inference time with no weight updates (usable from less than two minutes of audio per the October 2026 page, ready in seconds, quality capped by the reference, weaker cross-style generalisation, Starter plan and up) versus Professional Voice Cloning as fine-tuning that modifies model parameters (~30 minutes of high-quality audio recommended, recording quality matters more, takes minutes, Creator plan and up) — the "representation not recording" framing, the consent confirmation, and the voice-CAPTCHA verification step and its stated limit (it confirms the requester was present, not that the voice is theirs).
3. ElevenLabs. ElevenAPI Pricing, accessed 2026-05-31. https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api. First-party source for the pay-as-you-go API rates used in the worked example: text-to-speech Flash/Turbo $0.05 per 1,000 characters (~75 ms latency) and Multilingual v2/v3 $0.10 per 1,000 characters; Scribe speech-to-text $0.22/hour and Scribe realtime $0.39/hour; Dubbing $0.33/minute watermarked; Voice Changer and Voice Isolator $0.12/minute. Establishes that the API is metered per unit rather than out of a monthly credit bucket. Superseded for current rates by the October 2026 ElevenAPI reference below.
4. ElevenLabs. Safety and An overview of Safety framework for AI voice agents, accessed 2026-05-31. https://elevenlabs.io/safety. First-party source for the platform's defence layers: voice-CAPTCHA gating of professional clones, automated blocking of celebrity and high-risk/political voices (with heightened election-period vigilance), and content moderation via AI classifiers plus human reviewers plus internal investigations.
5. ElevenLabs. Prohibited Use Policy, accessed 2026-05-31. https://elevenlabs.io/use-policy. First-party source for the banned uses cited — fraudulent impersonation, voter suppression, and impersonation of political candidates or elected officials regardless of claimed authorisation.
6. ElevenLabs. Earn with Your Voice — Join the ElevenLabs Voice Library / Voice Actor Payouts, accessed 2026-05-31. https://elevenlabs.io/payouts. First-party source for the Voice Library marketplace and payouts that turn voice consent into a compensated, platform-managed licence.
7. U.S. Congress. S.1367 — NO FAKES Act of 2025, 119th Congress, text via Congress.gov and GovTrack, accessed 2026-05-31. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1367/text. Primary legislative source for the bill's federal digital-replica right, the definition of a digital replica, the notice-and-takedown mechanism and safe harbor, the $5,000-per-violation and $25,000-false-notice penalties, the postmortem registration via the Copyright Office, and the non-preemption of state laws existing as of 2 January 2025 (preserving Tennessee's ELVIS Act). Companion House bill: H.R.2794.
8. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP. Senators Officially Introduce NO FAKES Act with Digital Replica Right, 2025, accessed 2026-05-31. https://www.manatt.com/insights/newsletters/client-alert/senators-officially-introduce-no-fakes-act-with-di. Legal-analysis source for the DMCA-modelled notice-and-takedown design, the safe-harbor conditions (designated Copyright Office agent, repeat-offender termination policy, no proactive monitoring duty), and the digital-replica right's scope. Where this secondary analysis and the bill text diverge on detail, the bill text (reference 7) controls.
9. Sen. Chris Coons. Senators … reintroduce NO FAKES Act to protect individuals and creators from digital replicas, press release, April 2025, accessed 2026-05-31. https://www.coons.senate.gov/news/press-releases/. Source for the April 2025 reintroduction, the bipartisan sponsor list, and the named industry backers (SAG-AFTRA, RIAA, OpenAI, Google, Disney, Adobe, and others).
10. Electronic Frontier Foundation. NO FAKES — A Dream for Lawyers, a Nightmare for Everyone Else, 2024, accessed 2026-05-31. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/no-fakes-dream-lawyers-nightmare-everyone-else. Source for the free-expression critique of the bill — the chilling-effect concern over a broad likeness right — included for balance against the proponents' framing.
11. European Union. EU AI Act, Article 50 — Transparency Obligations for Providers and Deployers of Certain AI Systems, accessed 2026-05-31. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/. Primary regulatory source for the 2 August 2026 effective date, the provider duty to mark synthetic audio in a machine-readable format, the deployer duty to disclose deepfakes, the artistic/satirical and law-enforcement carve-outs, and the scope covering all generative AI systems including audio synthesis.
12. Jones Day. European Commission Publishes Draft Code of Practice on AI Labelling and Transparency, January 2026, accessed 2026-05-31. https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2026/01/european-commission-publishes-draft-code-of-practice-on-ai-labelling-and-transparency. Source for the status of the Article 50 Code of Practice — second draft published in early 2026, final version expected around June 2026, ahead of the August deadline.
13. ElevenLabs Help Center. How do text characters and credits work?, accessed 2026-05-31. https://help.elevenlabs.io/hc/en-us. First-party source for the credit model: one credit equals one character on the standard Multilingual model and half a credit per character on Flash and Turbo, plus the official "100,000 credits ≈ 100 minutes" conversion used to sanity-check the article's characters-to-minutes arithmetic.
14. ElevenLabs. ElevenAPI Pricing, accessed 2026-10-15. https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api. Current API list rates: Flash/Turbo $0.04 and Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3 $0.08 per 1,000 characters; Scribe v2 $0.22/hour; Dubbing v1 $0.33/minute with watermark. Replaces the May 2026 rates ($0.05 / $0.10) used in the earlier version of the worked example.
15. ElevenLabs Help Center. Can I create a Professional Voice Clone of someone else's voice?, accessed 2026-10-15. https://help.elevenlabs.io/hc/en-us/articles/36842751624209. First-party source for the rule that a PVC can only be made of the account holder's own voice and that other voices are shared from the owner's account.
16. Unite.AI. ElevenLabs Launches Eleven v4 With Low-Latency Turbo Variant, September 2026, accessed 2026-10-15. https://www.unite.ai/elevenlabs-launches-eleven-v4-with-low-latency-turbo-variant/. Source for the 28 September 2026 launch of Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, 90+ languages, the company-reported ~150 ms time to first speech and the September 2026 Artificial Analysis ranking.
17. Office of Rep. María Elvira Salazar. NO FAKES Act Advances Out of Senate Judiciary Committee with Unanimous Support, 22 June 2026, accessed 2026-10-15. https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-salazars-no-fakes-act-advances-out-senate-judiciary-committee-unanimous. Source for H.R.8915, the May 2026 reintroduction and the unanimous committee vote. See also S&P Global Market Intelligence, Senate Judiciary advances NO FAKES Act on unanimous vote, 23 June 2026.
18. ByteBack Law. A Federal Shift in AI and the Right of Publicity? NO FAKES Act Advances in Congress, August 2026, accessed 2026-10-15. https://www.bytebacklaw.com/2026/08/a-federal-shift-in-ai-and-the-right-of-publicity-no-fakes-act-advances-in-congress/. Source for the 2026 text's $5,000–$25,000 statutory damages per violative replica, the notice-and-takedown safe harbor and the preemption carve-outs.
19. ActuIA. AI Act: obligations in force and delays under omnibus 2026/1744, 2026, accessed 2026-10-15. https://www.actuia.com/en/news/ai-act-obligations-in-force-and-delays-under-omnibus-2026-1744/. Source for Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (OJ 24 July 2026, in force 27 July 2026) and the 2 December 2026 Article 50(2) deadline for generative systems already on the market.
20. Paul, Weiss. EU Finalises Transparency Rules for AI-Generated Content, 2026, accessed 2026-10-15. https://www.paulweiss.com/insights/client-memos/eu-finalises-transparency-rules-for-ai-generated-content. Source for the Commission's final Article 50 guidelines of 20 July 2026, the Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content (about 190 signatories by 31 July 2026, at least two machine-readable marking techniques) and the no-retroactive-labelling rule. Supersedes the Jones Day draft-status reference above.