Mastermind behind Biden AI robocalls fined $6M by FCC

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday fined Democratic operative Steve Kramer $6 million for disseminating a series of robocalls containing an AI-generated voice of President Joe Biden that was spread to voters during January’s New Hampshire Primary.

In May, Kramer was indicted by a federal grand jury in New Hampshire, facing candidate impersonation charges and felony charges for bribery and intimidation. The AI-generated Biden voice told voters not to go to the polls, urging them to save their votes for November. He is required to pay the fine within 30 days or the matter will be referred to the Justice Department, the FCC said.

“The misuse of generative AI technology and spoofing to interfere in elections undermines the foundation of our democracy and poses a significant threat, the full scope of which is yet to be determined,” said Loyaan Egal, who heads the agency’s Enforcement Bureau. “Today’s significant penalty sends a clear message to bad actors that the abuse of this technology will not be tolerated.”

The FCC first proposed the fine in May. In February, Kramer admitted to creating the robocall operation. A former consultant for Minnesota congressman and presidential candidate Dean Phillips, Kramer said the calls were created as a way to spell out the dangers of AI content in political campaigns.

The agency in February issued a declaratory ruling making AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal, granting state attorneys general more authority to go after entities that target consumers with voice cloning technology in robocall scams.

Kramer hired Voice Broadcasting Corp. to handle the call transmissions, which in turn utilized Texas-based Life Corp.’s services to route the calls through the voice service provider Lingo Telecom, the FCC said.

Lingo then transmitted these calls and marked them with the highest level of caller ID attestation, reducing the chance that other providers would identify the calls as sham communications, the agency added. In a separate enforcement, the commission proposed a $2 million fine against Lingo for potentially failing to employ adequate “Know Your Customer” measures meant to authenticate caller ID data connected to the robocalls.

Spam and robocalling operations have been traditionally carried out in environments with human managers overseeing the schemes, but AI systems have automated some of these tasks, allowing the roboservices to leverage speech and voice-generating capabilities of AI tools available to consumers online or more malicious versions distributed on the dark web.