Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com & Ors. (with Abhishek Bachchan v. The Bollywood Tee Shop & Ors.)

Actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her husband Abhishek Bachchan each filed commercial suits in the Delhi High Court in September 2025. The suits followed a series of ex parte orders for celebrities, starting with Amitabh Bachchan in 2022, Anil Kapoor in 2023 and Jackie Shroff in 2024, which the plaintiffs cited as precedent.¹² Bar & Bench reported on 9 September 2025 that the actor alleged her image, name and AI-generated likeness were being used without authorisation for commercial gain.⁹

Both plaintiffs were represented by Pravin Anand and a team, with Senior Advocate Sandeep Sethi appearing for Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. The suits sought permanent injunctions and damages for infringement of personality and publicity rights, moral rights, passing off and unfair competition. Abhishek Bachchan's plaint also relied on trade marks, copyright and performers' rights.¹²

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com & Ors. (CS(COMM) 956/2025) named 13 defendants. As pleaded, they included a site, aishwaryaworld.com, that presented itself as her official website and sold autographed pictures and wallpapers; apkpure.com, which hosted APK files with her images as wallpapers; merchandise sellers bollywoodteeshop.com and kashcollectiveco.com; an e-commerce platform offering mugs and T-shirts from third-party sellers; and a "motivational speaker" business using her name and image. Two defendants were AI-specific. Defendant 7, jainatorai.com, was a chatbot with AI characters that allegedly impersonated her and made sexually-coloured remarks. Defendants 8 and 9 were YouTube channels allegedly posting AI-generated deepfake shorts of her and other celebrities. Google LLC (Defendant 10) hosted the channels, and MeitY and the Department of Telecommunications were impleaded as proforma defendants to help enforcement.¹

Abhishek Bachchan v. The Bollywood Tee Shop & Ors. (CS(COMM) 960/2025) named 18 defendants. They included merchandise and wallpaper sites (The Bollywood Tee Shop, TeePublic, Ice Poster, TopPix Autographs, WallpaperCave and Wallpapers.com), sellers of signed posters and mugs on Amazon, and five YouTube channels. Three of the channels, @aimh39, @EatWithCelebrities and @Enjoywithcelebrities, allegedly used AI to generate images of him alongside other celebrities. Two others allegedly made sexually explicit or "unsavoury" AI-generated content about him. Google LLC, MeitY, the Department of Telecommunications and John Doe defendants completed the array.² The plaintiff argued that the defendants monetised his persona and that the activity might conflict with his existing endorsement contracts.²

Justice Tejas Karia heard the Aishwarya suit on 9 September 2025 and passed an ex parte interim order the same day. He exempted the plaintiff from pre-institution mediation under Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act because she sought urgent interim relief, following Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Krithi, and then dealt with the interim application (I.A. 22163/2025).¹ On 10 September he passed a mirror order in the Abhishek Bachchan suit, which also cites the Aishwarya order as precedent.²⁸

The operative directions in the Aishwarya order (para 39) were:¹

• Restraint on Defendants 1-9 and 13: no use of the name "Aishwarya Rai Bachchan" or the acronym "ARB", or her image, likeness or other persona attributes, including through AI, deepfakes and face morphing, in violation of her personality and publicity rights and moral rights, or by passing off.
• Restraint on Defendants 3-9 and 13: no creation or dissemination of products (such as T-shirts, mugs and posters) or content made with such technology that dilutes her public persona.
• E-commerce defendant (Defendant 5): take down the listed URLs within 72 hours of notice and file basic subscriber information (names, emails, contact numbers, IP logs, registration details) of operators and sellers in a sealed or password-protected cover within 7 days.
• Google LLC (Defendant 10): take down the YouTube URLs listed in Document-B within 72 hours and file sealed subscriber information for owners and operators within 7 days. It also had to supply available subscriber details for Defendants 8 and 9 so that the plaintiff could correct their addresses.
• MeitY and the Department of Telecommunications (Defendants 11 and 12): issue directions to block and disable the URLs in Document-C within 7 days.

The Abhishek Bachchan order (para 39) has the same structure. It restrains Defendants 1-14 and 18 from using "Abhishek Bachchan" and "AB", his voice, image and likeness, through AI, generative AI, machine learning, deepfakes and face morphing. It lists takedown directions for each named site and for Google (72 hours), requires sealed subscriber information within 7 days, and asks MeitY and the Department of Telecommunications to block the URLs in Annexure-A within 7 days. The plaintiff may also share the order with third-party hosts, who must act within 72 hours.²

The reasoning in the Aishwarya order is short and relies on the earlier Delhi decisions in Anil Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan and Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf. The court defined personality rights as the right to control and protect the exploitation of a person's attributes. It said they have a commercial facet and a dignity facet (paras 34-35). On the pleadings and documents it found that the plaintiff's attributes were being misused by defendants "employing technological tools, including Artificial Intelligence" (para 36). The court held that this caused financial harm and also harmed her dignity, reputation and goodwill (paras 36-37). It then found a prima facie case, a balance of convenience in the plaintiff's favour and a risk of irreparable harm, which justified an ex parte injunction (para 38).¹ Bar & Bench reported the judge as saying that courts cannot turn a blind eye to unauthorised exploitation of a person's personality rights.⁷

The Abhishek order adds more on dignity. It treats unauthorised commercial exploitation as directly affecting both economic interests and dignity, and it finds that depicting him in misleading, derogatory or inappropriate settings intrudes on his right to privacy, a harm made worse by online dissemination. Without an injunction, it says, the actor and his family would suffer "not only financially but also with respect to his right to live with dignity" (paras 35-38).²

Because both orders were passed without hearing the defendants, their reasoning does not engage with defences such as parody or free speech. A LiveLaw analysis of October 2025 criticised the wave of celebrity orders, including those for the Bachchan family, as piecemeal and often overbroad. It argued that the sweeping John Doe orders can inadvertently restrain satire, parody, criticism and news reporting that never had a chance to be argued, and called for legislation with express carve-outs, particularly for AI-generated content.¹⁰

The two orders show how the Delhi High Court has turned personality-rights relief into a template for AI-enabled misuse. Four features stand out.

1. AI tools are named. Both orders restrain imitation through AI, generative AI, machine learning, deepfakes and face morphing, as Anil Kapoor's 2023 order did.
2. Chatbots are treated as a form of impersonation. Defendant 7 in the Aishwarya suit offered AI characters that spoke in her name. The orders do not decide who is responsible for what an AI character says, but they reach the site that hosts it.
3. Platforms and the state are drawn in. Google must take down URLs and identify channel operators, and MeitY and the Department of Telecommunications are asked to block URLs, which gives the orders a blocking mechanism that private injunctions normally lack.
4. The orders spread. Bar & Bench reported that the Bombay High Court relied on the Aishwarya Rai Bachchan order when it protected Asha Bhosle against AI voice cloning in September 2025.¹¹

The orders do not answer questions the overview entry on AI personality-rights orders raises: whether training a model on a celebrity's images or recordings is itself infringing, whether platforms should police new content proactively, or how long such wide injunctions should last.

Both suits remain pending and the ex parte interim injunctions continue. On 15 January 2026 Justice Tushar Rao Gedela took up both suits and listed them before the Joint Registrar on 20 April 2026 and before the court on 12 May 2026. The Google and Union of India counsel appeared at that hearing.³⁵

On 12 May 2026 the court dealt with applications to delete defendants after they had complied. In the Aishwarya suit it allowed I.A. 27997/2025 and deleted Defendant 5, identified in the order as Etsy, which filed a compliance affidavit dated 31 October 2025 and undertook to comply with future takedown orders. It also allowed I.A. 26702/2025 and deleted Defendant 7, identified as Janitor AI, which relied on a compliance affidavit dated 27 October 2025. Janitor AI's counsel was directed to file an affidavit of undertaking within three weeks.⁴ In the Abhishek suit it deleted Etsy (Defendant 9) and TeePublic (Defendant 2), again on the strength of compliance affidavits (dated 31 October 2025 and 8 February 2026) and undertakings to comply with future takedown orders.⁶ Both orders list the suits before the Joint Registrar on 4 August 2026 for completion of pleadings, and record no decree or final judgment.⁴⁶

As of 15 October 2026, no order later than 12 May 2026 has been verified for this entry, so what happened at the 4 August 2026 listing is not recorded here.