Apple and Google have been ordered to take down apps that can “nudify” or “undress” people and told that they must stop profiting from the harmful technology, according to cease-and-desist letters sent to the companies seen by WIRED.
On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images and “sever” business relationships with the app developers.
“Generating non-consensual intimate images is illegal, harmful, and completely unacceptable,” Chiu tells WIRED. The city attorney, whose office previously took legal action against 16 popular deepfake websites, says Apple and Google have likely “made millions of dollars in fees” from apps that offer nudification, and they should improve their moderation processes to stop them appearing in their stores in the first place.
“These companies have responsibility to ensure that apps on their platforms do not facilitate sexual abuse,” Chiu says. The city’s legal letters say California’s laws prohibit supporting services that create deepfake pornography. The apps use in-app payments, which the tech companies take a cut of, the letters says. “The fact that some of the world’s largest and most established technology companies are facilitating this has to stop.”
Researchers have repeatedly found and reported apps in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store that allow people to generate sexual images using AI—including some apps being rated as suitable for use by children. While new laws and bans aim to tackle the scourge of explicit deepfakes online, technology and social media companies consistently direct millions of people toward the harmful tech.
Both Apple and Google have developer policies that prohibit pornography, abuse, and harassment on their platforms. They have previously removed dozens of nudify and deepfake apps, after reports by researchers and journalists.
Google spokesperson Dan Jackson tells WIRED that the company has deleted “hundreds” of apps with nudifying features for policy violations, including the five Android apps flagged by Chiu’s office, among other steps to restrict access to them.
“Google Play does not allow apps that contain sexual content, and we continually take proactive steps to detect and remove apps with harmful content,” Jackson says in a statement. “When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store.”
Apple did not provide comment ahead of publication.
Over the last five years, a highly lucrative slurry of deepfake “nudification” tech has emerged online—most transparently with xAI’s Grok being used to create millions of sexualized images in January. A host of apps, websites, and bots allow people (mostly men) to upload pictures of people (overwhelmingly women and girls) and digitally “remove” clothing or place them into graphic sexual scenarios.
Often all it takes to create sexual deepfakes is a reference photo and a couple of clicks, with some results available in seconds. Images and videos have become more realistic as the underlying generative AI technology has improved, with services providing some results for free or charging small fees to create the harmful content. Previous reporting by WIRED and Indicator Media has uncovered incidents in at least 90 schools where deepfake sexual abuse images have been created of minors.
“These images are used to bully, humiliate, and threaten women and girls,” Chiu says. “This industry has a horrific impact on one’s reputation, mental health, loss of autonomy. There have been victims who’ve been suicidal.”
The 13 apps investigated by the City Attorney’s Office—eight on the App Store and five on the Play Store—broadly advertise themselves as “face-swapping” tools, with their ability to create sexual deepfakes available once people use them. The website of one app, which has more than 1 million downloads, displays more than a dozen different styles of AI images it will generate, including “bikini queen curvy,” “calm busty,” and “cinematic intimacy.” Many of the styles show sexualized images of women alongside their descriptions. The homepage of another of the targeted apps claims to produce “free and uncensored” videos. WIRED is not naming the apps to avoid pushing people toward them.
The problem won’t come as a surprise to Apple and Google. Over the last year, multiple reports have identified apps on the companies’ platforms that can allow people to create nonconsensual nude images or videos. In January and April this year, the Tech Transparency Project, an independent watchdog group, uncovered around 100 apps across both the App Store and Play Store, as well as some advertisements for nudifying technology on the platforms. (Google’s Jackson says the company has removed most of the apps identified by TTP.) Apps identified by the research were estimated to have been collectively downloaded around 480 million times and may have made around $120 million in combined revenues.
“We didn’t think after the first report that we would see this as a problem again—and it was just as bad, if not worse, after the second report,” says Katie Paul, the director of TTP. “Apple and Google make a lot of promises in their marketing about how trusted and safe their app stores are. And that is just not what is playing out in reality.”
Meanwhile, in a preprint research paper published in May, researchers from Cornell University and Georgetown University identified 420 apps offering general face-swapping capabilities on Google’s and Apple’s app stores. They tested 155 to see if they could be used to create face swaps with nude images; in 70 percent of cases, it was possible, with the apps not including safety measures to prevent this.
“None of these apps are advertised as nudification apps,” the research says. “This suggests that face swap apps, and many other forms of AI image generation and editing apps, are effectively ‘dual-use’: apps that evade content moderation by platforms because they present as benign, but possess the capability to create harmful content.”
Chiu, the San Francisco city attorney, says his office will keep pursuing the problem after being “absolutely horrified” at the harm and scale of the technology. “My hope is that Apple and Google will immediately remove these apps and strengthen their screening systems to make sure that apps like this never get onto their platforms in the future,” he says. “It’s our hope that these companies will do the right thing—but if they don’t, we will have to consider all of our legal options.”
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