Iowa Supreme Court: a deepfake claim does not bar video evidence

The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed the sexual abuse conviction of Max Amyda on October 9, 2026, holding that a bare claim that the state's video exhibit was a deepfake does not raise a genuine question about authenticity and does not keep the video out of evidence.

The unanimous opinion in State v. Amyda, No. 24-1563, was written by Justice Edward Mansfield, on further review of a January 28, 2026 Iowa Court of Appeals decision. Judge Steven J. Andreasen presided in Woodbury County District Court. A jury convicted Amyda of third-degree sexual abuse, a class "C" felony, on August 16, 2024, and he received a ten-year indeterminate prison term with a special sentence of lifetime parole.

Authentication was the fight. Under Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.901(a), the State had to "produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is." Rule 5.901(b)(4) lists "[d]istinctive characteristics and the like" among the ways to meet that burden, defined as a video's appearance, contents, substance, internal patterns or other distinctive characteristics taken with the circumstances.

The State had no chain of custody. According to the opinion, the investigating officer never obtained a search warrant for Amyda's electronic devices, Amyda did not have his cellphone on him when he was arrested, and the officer could not retrace the video's digital footprint. The victim was asleep during the abuse shown and could not attest to it.

The video appears to have been shot on a cellphone by the person whose hand is visible, and the victim had messaged Amyda that evening, so the court assumed he had his phone. She recognized the room as her bedroom, her bed and pillows, and the hand as Amyda's from a tattoo on it, consistent with the only night he was in her room in early May 2023. The video surfaced a little over a month later, and Amyda blocked her when she tried to ask him about it.

"Collectively, these circumstances were enough to admit the video," Mansfield wrote. "And the defendant's mere speculation that the video was a deepfake was not enough to bar its admission."

Amyda also lost his best-evidence challenge. Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.1002 requires an original recording unless a rule or statute says otherwise, and rule 5.1003 makes a duplicate admissible "unless a genuine question is raised about the original's authenticity or the circumstances make it unfair to admit the duplicate." The court held that Amyda raised conjecture rather than a genuine question.

The decision rests on Iowa's circumstantial-authentication line, State v. Holderness (Iowa 1980) and State v. Farnum (Iowa 1986), and reads State v. Manning (Iowa 2025) as not limiting video authentication to a firsthand or "silent" witness. The court distinguished In re M.S. (N.Y. Feb. 17, 2026), where New York's highest court held 4-3 that videos from a self-described hacker had not been authenticated, saying that here "there are no identifiable circumstances to suggest that the video might be a deepfake."

The opinion also notes a possible new Federal Rule of Evidence 901(c) under consideration at the Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules: a party challenging evidence as fabricated by generative artificial intelligence would have to "present evidence sufficient to support a finding of fabrication to warrant an inquiry by the court," after which the proponent would have to show the item "is more likely than not authentic."

That proposal is not adopted. A Baker Botts note on the committee's May 7, 2026 decisions records that the committee declined to publish the draft for comment, and its Reporter, Fordham law professor Daniel J. Capra, wrote that a rule published then could not take effect before December 1, 2028. A Federal Judicial Center survey in the May 2026 agenda book drew responses from 931 judges, a 45% rate; 15 had encountered deepfake issues, and a majority favored a rule.

The October 15, 2026 agenda book shows the committee convened a panel of experts on deepfakes in Boston and lists factors its Reporter proposes for a threshold showing, among them missing or anomalous metadata, unexplained edits or compression artifacts, and gaps in chain of custody. Investing.com reported that OpenAI policy counsel Shira Anderson told the panel AI images keep improving and she does not believe a scientific method to detect them will exist. Radio Iowa reported the decision the same day, and Eugene Volokh's blog at Reason summarized it on October 13, 2026.

The practical thread for people who make video is provenance. Courts and rule writers are moving toward asking where a file came from, whether its metadata is intact and whether it was edited, the same information a generation tool either writes into a file or discards. As of October 16, 2026, no federal rule of evidence specific to AI-fabricated content is in effect.

The Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules is next scheduled to meet on April 14, 2027 in Washington, D.C.; draft Rule 901(c) remains unpublished for comment.