Law 132/2025 and the deepfake offence
Law no. 132 of 23 September 2025 sets national rules alongside the AI Act and names two national AI authorities: AgID, the Agency for Digital Italy, and ACN, the National Cybersecurity Agency. Its best-known provision is a new offence, article 612-quater of the Penal Code: disseminating images, video or voices falsified or altered with AI, without the person's consent, in a way that can mislead about their authenticity and causes unjust harm. The penalty is one to five years in prison, and in most cases prosecution depends on a complaint from the victim. The law does not create a separate national label for advertising, so the AI Act's disclosure rules set the labelling baseline in Italy.
Copyright, portraits and 'Made in Italy'
The same law amended Italy's copyright law, Law 633/1941, to say that protected works are works of human ingenuity, including works created with AI tools where they result from the author's own intellectual effort. It also added rules on text and data mining. Purely generated output is therefore unlikely to be protected, so document the human creative decisions behind key assets. Article 96 of the copyright law already bars displaying, reproducing or selling a person's portrait without consent, and the Civil Code protects against abuse of a person's image. Italy also treats false or misleading suggestions of Italian origin seriously, so generated flags, landscapes and Italian-sounding names on products not made in Italy invite trouble.
IAP, AGCM and AGCOM
The Istituto dell'Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria runs Italian self-regulation through its Code of Marketing Communication Self-Regulation, and its jury rules quickly on complaints, with members and media expected to comply. The IAP's digital chart sets out how influencer content should be disclosed. The competition and consumer authority, the AGCM, enforces the rules on unfair commercial practices and can fine up to EUR 10 million per practice. AGCOM, the communications regulator, has applied audiovisual rules to major influencers since its 2024 guidelines, extended by a code of conduct in July 2025, covering creators with at least 500,000 followers or a million average monthly views on a platform. Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, has acted quickly against AI services before.
Dubbing, register and the visual standard
Italy dubs almost all foreign film and television, and its dubbing actors are well known, so audiences expect natural, lip-synced Italian and notice a flat synthetic voice at once. The studio's dubbing keeps the original timing, but Italian voices still need a native director's ear for rhythm and emphasis. Most consumer brands address people as tu; luxury, finance and B2B often use Lei, and mixing the two looks careless. Italian audiences hold food, fashion and design to a high standard, and generated imagery that gets a classic wrong, such as cream in a carbonara or a stiff, badly draped suit, becomes a joke rather than an ad. German is co-official in South Tyrol and French in the Aosta Valley.
Updated 25 September 2026 · General information, not legal advice. Rules change, so check the current text with your legal team before relying on it.