California AB 723: AI-edited listing photos must be disclosed

The short answer: starting January 1, 2026, if you market a California property with a listing image that was digitally altered, including by artificial intelligence, your ad has to say the image was altered and give viewers a way to see the original, unaltered photo. This comes from California AB 723, which was chaptered in October 2025 as Chapter 497, Statutes of 2025, and adds Section 10140.8 to the Business and Professions Code.

The law applies to a real estate broker or salesperson, or a person acting on their behalf, which includes a marketing assistant, a photographer, or a vendor editing images for the agent. If that describes your workflow, the disclosure is your responsibility to get right.

AB 723 defines a digitally altered image as one that has been altered through photo editing software or artificial intelligence to add, remove, or change elements. The statute lists examples: fixtures, furniture, appliances, flooring, walls, paint color, hardscape, landscape, facade, floor plans, and elements outside of or visible from the property. Virtual staging, sky replacement, removing power lines, adding grass, or an AI redesign of a room all fall inside this definition.

Routine adjustments that do not add, remove, or change elements are treated as standard photography, not covered alterations. MLS guidance interpreting the law points to brightness, exposure, white balance, and minor color correction as the kind of everyday edits that do not trigger the disclosure. The line the law draws is between adjusting how an existing scene looks and changing what is in the scene.

In practice this is a short, plainly worded line that travels with the image. It tells the viewer two facts: that the picture was digitally altered, and where to find the original. A workable pattern is a caption on or next to the photo along the lines of a statement that the image has been digitally altered and that the original, unaltered image is available at a linked website or by scanning a QR code. The point is transparency: a buyer should never mistake an edited image for the property's current condition, and should always have a one-tap path to the real photo.

KitClosed applies a visible disclosure to images edited with its AI photo tools, and it enforces compliance behavior on the server rather than trusting the client, so a disclosure is not something an agent can silently strip off a deliverable. That supports the kind of disclosure AB 723 describes, but it does not replace your own judgment: you remain responsible for meeting the law for your listing, including providing access to the original image. Treat the product as a tool that makes the honest path the easy one, and confirm your MLS and brokerage rules on top of it.