What AI Laws Do Montana Businesses Need to Know?

Montana does not have a single “AI Act” that tells every private business how to use ChatGPT. What it has is a 2025 package of narrower laws: a right to use computing tools, limits on government AI, a property right in name, voice, and likeness, election-deepfake rules, and consumer-privacy rights that cover some automated decisions. Most of those duties do not apply to a typical local company drafting a service page with an AI assistant. A few of them do, if you clone a real person’s face or voice in an ad, run political content, or process enough Montana consumer data to fall under the privacy statute.

This article is a practical briefing for business owners and website managers, not legal advice. Whether a statute applies to your company depends on what you do, who you serve, and how you use the tools. A qualified Montana lawyer should review that. What follows is what the official texts actually say, and what that does — and does not — change about search visibility.

There is no Montana AI Act for private companies

Several U.S. states have been writing broad rules for how businesses develop or deploy AI. Montana took a different path. The 2025 session produced specific statutes, not a general licensing regime for every chatbot or writing assistant.

The closest thing to a statewide AI policy is the Right to Compute Act (Mont. Code Ann. § 2-10-204). It limits government actions that restrict the private ownership or lawful use of computational resources. Those restrictions must be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. In plain language: Montana law starts from the premise that using computers and AI for lawful work is protected, not presumptively regulated.

The same act does add a duty if AI is actually running critical infrastructure. Section 2-10-205 says that when a critical infrastructure facility is controlled in whole or in part by a “critical artificial intelligence system,” the deployer must develop a reasonable risk-management policy after deploying it. That policy has to consider recognized frameworks such as NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework, the ISO/IEC 4200 AI standard named in the statute, or another nationally or internationally recognized AI risk framework. A plan already required by federal rules counts as compliance. If you do not operate that kind of facility, this section is not your to-do list.

The government AI rules are not a private-business checklist

House Bill 178 is now Title 2, chapter 21 of the Montana Code. It applies to government entities and state officers, not to a Missoula retailer or a Bozeman clinic’s marketing site.

Those public bodies may not use an AI system for cognitive behavioral manipulation, for classification that results in unlawful discrimination or a disparate impact based on a differentiating characteristic, for a malicious purpose, or for surveillance of public spaces except in the narrow cases the statute lists. If they publish AI-produced material that a responsible human has not reviewed, they must disclose that. If a public interface uses AI, that use must be disclosed. If an AI system produces a recommendation or decision that could affect a person’s rights, duties, or privileges, a trained human in a position to reject or modify it has to review it.

If you contract with a city, county, or state agency, those rules may show up in procurement. They do not, by themselves, require you to label every AI-assisted blog post on a private website.

The law most likely to affect marketing: name, voice, and likeness

Since 1 January 2026, Mont. Code Ann. § 30-14-1714 gives Montana residents a property right in their name, voice, and visual likeness. The right is transferable and lasts 20 years after death for people who were Montana residents, or who were domiciled here when they died.

The commercial-use piece is the one that matters for ads and websites. A person can be liable for actual damages plus profits if, without consent, they intentionally publish, perform, distribute, or otherwise make public a digital voice or visual depiction for commercial use, knowing it is an unauthorized digital depiction of that individual. The statute defines those depictions as newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic renderings that a reasonable person would believe are genuine — including material created or altered with AI.

There are First Amendment carve-outs, including news reporting, comment, criticism, scholarship, satire, parody, and fleeting or negligible use. The statute also does not apply to broadband internet access providers.

Practical takeaway: do not put a cloned customer, competitor, celebrity, or employee into an ad, testimonial, or “virtual spokesperson” without a clear right to do that. A stock-style illustration that is not a highly realistic depiction of a particular person is a different fact pattern from a deepfake of someone your audience would recognize. When the person is identifiable, get authorization rather than guessing.

Consumer privacy, not “AI ranking law”

The Consumer Data Privacy Act is Montana’s main statute for personal data. It is not an AI-search law. It can still matter if you use automated tools to make consequential decisions about people.

Under § 30-14-2803, the core of the act applies to a person that conducts business in Montana, or that produces products or services targeted to Montana residents, and that either:

controls or processes the personal data of at least 25,000 consumers — not counting data processed solely to complete a payment — or
controls or processes the personal data of at least 15,000 consumers and derives more than 25% of gross revenue from selling personal data.

A “consumer” here is a Montana resident acting in a personal or household context, not someone dealing with you only as an employee or in a commercial role. Many small local businesses never hit those numbers. Some do, especially if they run a large customer list, an app, or an advertising stack that processes Montana residents at scale. A few sections — including duties tied to online services used by minors — apply more broadly to businesses that target Montana residents, even below the 25,000-consumer line. That is a counsel question, not a guess from a blog post.

If you are in scope, consumers have a right under § 30-14-2808 to opt out of profiling in furtherance of automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. The statute defines those effects as the provision or denial of things like lending, housing, insurance, education, criminal justice, employment, health care, or access to necessities such as food and water. A recommendation widget on a blog is not automatically in that category. An automated hire/no-hire, lend/no-lend, or cover/deny decision may be.

Covered businesses also have notice, opt-out, and assessment duties that go beyond AI. The Montana Department of Justice publishes a Consumer Data Privacy summary. Use that, and the statute, rather than a vendor’s “AI compliance” sales page.

If you pay for political content

Mont. Code Ann. § 13-35-802 restricts deepfakes in election communications and electioneering communications. Within 60 days of the start of voting in an election where a candidate is on the ballot, a person or entity working in an official election capacity may not pay for or sponsor a communication that they knew or should have known is a deepfake of a candidate or political party on the ballot — unless the communication includes this disclosure: “This _____ (image/audio/video/multimedia) has been significantly edited by artificial intelligence and depicts speech or conduct that falsely appears to be authentic or truthful.” The statute also sets formatting rules for print, video, internet, and audio. Satire and parody are among the listed exceptions. If you are not paying for or sponsoring election communications, this is not your day-to-day website rule. If you are, treat that wording as statutory text, not optional marketing copy.

Criminal lines that are not “website policy”

Montana also criminalized certain nonconsensual intimate synthetic media and computer-generated child sexual abuse material. Those are criminal statutes, not a labeling checklist for a service page. The operational rule is simple: do not create, possess, or share that material. If that sentence is relevant to your product, you need a lawyer, not an insights article.

More rules may still be written

House Joint Resolution 4 asked for an interim study of artificial intelligence, including transparency, disclosure, and civil and criminal liability for entities that develop or deploy AI systems. The Energy and Technology Interim Committee has been conducting that study, with results due to the 70th Legislature. That is a reason to watch Helena, not a reason to invent duties that are not in current law.

If you serve customers outside Montana, other regimes can apply on their own terms. We covered the European overlay separately in what the EU’s ChatGPT rules mean for businesses. Federal consumer-protection rules still apply to advertising claims, whether a person or a model wrote them. Montana’s Right to Compute Act does not cancel those.

What this does not change about appearing in AI search

None of these statutes require ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google to mention your business, treat you as a trusted local source, or rank you above a competitor. They regulate how some AI systems may be used, how some public bodies must disclose them, and how a person’s name, voice, or likeness may be used commercially. They do not replace crawlability, entity clarity, or accurate public information.

If a customer in Billings asks an assistant who to hire, the model still has to find sources it can read and corroborate. A site that never states what the business does, a Google profile that contradicts the website, or pages that are not indexed will still leave you easy to skip. That work is what AI search optimization actually is, not a legal filing. A short test is in how to know whether your business appears in AI search.

Treat claims that “Montana’s new AI law will boost your ChatGPT ranking” with the same skepticism as any other unsupported ranking promise. The statutes do not publish a ranking formula, and neither do the platforms.

What to check this month

List the AI tools you actually use: writing assistants, image generators, a website chatbot, voice clones, hiring or lending models.
If any commercial creative uses a highly realistic digital face or voice of a real person, confirm you have authorization — especially for Montana residents.
If you run election or electioneering ads, check whether the content is a deepfake under § 13-35-802 and whether the statutory disclosure is required.
Count, roughly, how many Montana consumers’ personal data you control or process. If you are near 25,000 — or you sell personal data at scale — have counsel map the Consumer Data Privacy Act, including the opt-out for profiling that feeds consequential automated decisions.
If you operate critical infrastructure with AI in the control loop, confirm you have a written risk-management policy that satisfies § 2-10-205, or a federal plan that already does.
If you sell to government, read the contract. Disclosure and human-review duties in Title 2, chapter 21 bind the public body; they can still show up as vendor requirements.
Separately, test whether AI tools describe your business accurately. Legal compliance and search visibility are different jobs. See what makes a business easy for AI tools to understand.

What can be fixed — and what cannot

Whether you are a “controller,” whether a depiction is unauthorized, and whether an election communication needs a statutory disclaimer are lawyer-and-counsel work. Beartooth Labs does not offer legal services.

What we can fix is the technical side that still decides whether Google and AI systems can find and correctly describe you: crawlability, indexing, structured data, consistent name and location, and pages that state services in ordinary sentences. Montana’s 2025 laws make some uses of AI clearer, narrower, or off-limits. They do not make a vague website easier to recommend.

If you want a factual picture of how you appear across Google, Maps, and AI search, start with a free discoverability check. When the gaps need a full plan, that is the Discoverability Roadmap — and we implement the technical fixes when you want help doing the work.