ElevenLabs

On January 30, 2024 - days after the New Hampshire fake-Biden robocall - ElevenLabs released an open AI Speech Classifier tool allowing journalists, election officials, fact-checkers and consumers to determine whether an audio clip was likely generated by ElevenLabs voices. The detector was made available without API gating or rate limits. Independent evaluation in 2024 found accuracy of approximately 95% on ElevenLabs-generated audio but limited applicability to audio from competing voice-clone systems.

On January 21-22, 2024, voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary received robocalls using an AI-cloned voice of President Joe Biden telling them not to vote in the primary. Investigators at Pindrop and others traced the synthetic audio to ElevenLabs' voice-cloning system. ElevenLabs banned the account responsible and the FCC subsequently ruled AI-generated robocalls illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The political consultant who commissioned the calls was indicted and fined $6M by the FCC.

ElevenLabs partnered with the ALS Association, Aphasia Recovery Connection and other neurological disability advocacy groups beginning in late 2023 to provide free professional-grade voice cloning to patients facing progressive loss of speech, allowing them to communicate via AAC devices and synthesised speech in their own voice. The program reached more than 2,500 patients by mid-2025. Critics noted ElevenLabs benefited reputationally from the program while continuing to enable widespread voice-fraud harms, but the program's clinical impact has been independently documented.