If any product image or A+ content on your listings shows a photorealistic person generated by AI, Amazon now requires you to tag it before it goes live. The rule took effect for all sellers worldwide following a July 22 notice from Amazon, and it’s tied to a New York law that most sellers outside New York have never heard of but that Amazon applied globally anyway.
Here’s exactly what qualifies, what doesn’t, and how to add the tag.
New York’s AI advertising disclosure law (General Business Law section 396-b) took effect June 9, 2026. It requires a visible disclosure whenever an ad contains a “synthetic performer” — an AI-generated digital asset meant to look like a real human. Rather than build a New York-only compliance path, Amazon applied the requirement across every store worldwide. That’s consistent with how Amazon has handled other regional rules this year — build once, apply broadly, avoid maintaining parallel systems per state.
This isn’t happening in isolation, either. The FTC’s own endorsement guidance already treats an undisclosed AI-generated endorser as inherently deceptive, and expects disclosures to be clear and conspicuous rather than buried in technical metadata. New York forced the specific mechanism, but the direction — more disclosure, not less — matches where federal guidance was already headed.
The threshold is specific: a photorealistic person who was entirely generated by AI and isn’t based on a real person. If that describes an image or video in your listing or A+ content, you need to tag it.
What doesn’t qualify: real people in your photos, even if you used AI tools to edit or enhance the image. Characters from TV, film, games, or other clearly fictional/stylized content are also exempt. The rule is narrowly about photorealistic synthetic humans, not AI-assisted editing in general — a background removed with AI or a lighting adjustment doesn’t trigger this.
The requirement is a specific keyword, contains-synthetic-performer, added to the image or video file’s metadata before you upload it — specifically the dc:subject field in the file’s XMP metadata. Any IPTC-compatible metadata editor can add this; it’s a standard field most photo management tools already support, not a proprietary Amazon format.
Amazon spelled out the exact mechanics in its own seller forum announcement: tag the file locally before it goes into your listing or A+ content, not after. The tag needs to be present at upload — there’s no indication of a way to retroactively apply it to an image already live without re-uploading the file.
Amazon hasn’t published a detailed enforcement timeline publicly, but the pattern with other 2026 content-compliance changes — the 75-character title rewrite being the clearest recent example — has been automated detection followed by Amazon acting on the listing directly rather than issuing a warning first. Treat an untagged synthetic-performer image the same way you’d treat any other content-compliance gap: something Amazon’s systems can act on without a heads-up, not something to deprioritize because enforcement feels distant right now.
This is one more piece of a pattern that’s been building all year: Amazon increasingly treats listing content — titles, images, descriptions — as something it actively audits and can alter or flag, not just something sellers set once and leave alone. We’ve covered this shift from several angles already this year, from AI-rewritten titles to AI-driven content changes more broadly. The synthetic-performer tag is a narrower rule than either of those, but it fits the same shape: a content requirement that can affect your listing’s status without necessarily triggering an obvious notification first.
If a listing’s images or content get altered or flagged for a compliance reason like this one, that’s exactly the kind of change a Content Changed alert is built to surface — worth knowing about the moment it happens rather than noticing during your next manual listing review. A private label brand running AI-generated model photos across a dozen ASINs has a lot more surface area for this than a seller with two or three listings — worth an extra pass through your catalog either way.
No. The requirement specifically covers photorealistic AI-generated people — synthetic performers — not AI-generated backgrounds, props, or scenes without a human figure.
That’s exempt. The rule applies to people who were entirely generated by AI and don’t represent a real person — not real photos that were edited or enhanced with AI tools.
Yes — the requirement covers both product images and A+ content across all of Amazon’s stores worldwide, not just the main listing gallery.
There’s no indication of an automated audit tool for sellers to self-check existing images; the practical approach is reviewing any AI-generated imagery you’ve used for photorealistic people and re-tagging and re-uploading anything that qualifies.
Nisha Shetty · Marketing Manager, SentryKit
Nisha is a marketing manager and former Amazon seller who writes about e-commerce growth, consumer behavior, and digital retail trends.
