A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant stayed further proceedings before the Gujarat High Court in a public interest litigation filed by Vikas Vijay Nair seeking a regulatory framework to curb AI-generated deepfake content, and issued notice on a transfer petition filed by the Union government, returnable October 5. The Solicitor General told the bench that the Supreme Court had already taken up similar proceedings pending before other high courts, including petitions from Karnataka and Bombay involving parties such as X Corp, DigiPub News Foundation and comedian Kunal Kamra, and argued the Gujarat matter should be consolidated with those rather than proceed separately. The original Gujarat High Court PIL had, in April 2026, directed social media intermediaries including Meta, Google, X and Reddit to respond on their compliance with India's Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, as amended in 2026, and to onboard the government's SAHYOG portal, a coordination mechanism intended to speed up takedowns of unlawful synthetically generated content. Meta and Google have onboarded the portal; X has not, and reports before the Gujarat court indicated the platform has frequently failed to respond to takedown notices under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. The transfer petition, if granted, would move responsibility for setting any judicially supervised deepfake framework in India from multiple high courts to the Supreme Court alone.
IND AI and Regulation 13 Sept 2026
Supreme Court Stays Gujarat High Court Deepfake PIL, Moves to Centralize India's AI Regulation Litigation
The Supreme Court stayed all proceedings in a Gujarat High Court public interest litigation over AI-generated deepfakes on September 12, after the Union government sought to transfer the case to the Supreme Court to consolidate it with similar deepfake-regulation petitions already pending from Karnataka and Bombay High Courts.
Source: LiveLaw, September 12, 2026
Comments
0 commentsNo comments yet — be the first.