There are signs the nudify websites are updating their tactics and approaches to try to avoid any potential crackdowns or evade bans. “Only when businesses like these who facilitate nudification apps’ ‘perverse customer journey‘ take targeted action will we start to see meaningful progress in making these apps harder to access and profit from.” “Since 2019, nudification apps have moved from a handful of low-quality side projects to a cottage industry of professionalized illicit businesses with millions of users,” says Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes who first uncovered growth in the nudification ecosystem in 2020. For years, tech journalists have reported on how the deepfake economy has used mainstream payment services, social media advertisements, search engine exposure, and technology from big companies to operate. Many of the problems of tech companies allowing nudify platforms to use their systems are well-known.
This lawsuit, filed by xAI this week, reveals that the company discovered cases where Grok-generated child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) targeting adults were created.
In four applications, no login is ever required for the researcher to begin to generate imagery. All seven of these sites — and an additional three sites for a total of 10 — include text in their Terms of Service that state that a user needs consent from the image subject to upload their image to the AI generator. Seven of the 20 sites include text during age verification or before image generation that states that the user must have consent of the image subject. Our team additionally studied the consent-related text that users might encounter as they navigate the nudification applications as well as consent-related text in the sites’ terms of service, which users may not encounter but which are still present on these sites. 13 of these 17 sites show women without clothing but not in sexual positions, and another three show womens’ faces and bodies but include mens’ body parts as the women and men engage in sexual acts; mens faces are never shown. Recall from Section 3 that our data was collected from a region in the U.S. that does not have an age verification law for explicit content.
OpenAI is under fire because its ChatGPT app promotions were mistaken for organic suggestions.
Our database’s creation and ecosystem analysis involved accessing all those websites from the U.S. To support researchers potentially exposed to distressing material, we’ve partnered with a therapist offering open office sessions every other week—plus on-call availability whenever needed. By examining AI nudification tools, we risk empowering malicious actors with actionable insights about these applications.
On Thursday, San Francisco AI porn guides and reviews 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. McNulty said mainstream software companies try to block and report illicit use of their programs, but some developers offer apps with no built-in safety measures. In the first six months of 2025, she said the tipline received 400,000 such reports. Criminals can extract payment or sexual favors in exchange for agreeing not to distribute nude images to victims’ friends, classmates or family members. The new law was long overdue, said former Sen. Lauren Book, a leading advocate for sex crime victims. The new felony punishment includes a prison term up to 5 years for each image and a fine up to $5,000.
Disclosure statement
These include a bill to study and develop an „action plan“ on AI toys, a host of regulations around AI chatbots and minors, and a bill that would require AI chatbots to determine whether users are adults and, if not, require them to get parental consent. I’ve heard people compare creating fake nudes of someone without their consent to a form of sexual assault, and I wholeheartedly reject that premise. Personally, I’m skeptical of any law that targets the mere existence or use of „nudifying“ technology—a category which can include general-use AI image generation programs—rather than specific actions around these images.
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“They will likely continue to try to intermingle their operations into the adult content space, a trend that needs to be countered by mainstream tech companies and the adult industry as well.” While search engines direct people to nudify websites, the sites have increasingly received visitors from other online sources. Of the 10 most-visited sites, the research says, the most visitors came from the United States—India, Brazil, Mexico, and Germany make up the rest of the top five countries where people accessed the sites. Content delivery networks, hosting services, domain name companies, and webmaster services are all provided by a mixture of some of the biggest tech companies, plus some smaller businesses. Such intimate image abuse is harrowing for victims, and images can be difficult to scrub from the web.
Akerman has appointed a former Amazon legal advisor to lead its AI governance and data protection initiatives.
“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.“ They have previously removed dozens of nudify and deepfake apps, after reports by researchers and journalists. He praised the new law but noted that juvenile offenders — who may try to bully classmates by creating such images — often aren’t prosecuted criminally the first time they are caught. A sweeping new law in Florida makes it illegal to produce sexual images of a person using artificial intelligence or similar technologies without their permission.
However, the two applications that do not advertise AI Undressing but AI Face Swapping and Human-Assisted Undressing were included in the lists of AI Undressing tools we discovered or were provided. We focus our analysis first on the features that these nudification applications offer with respect to the manipulation of the likeness of an image subject (summarized in Table 1). In the second phase of our Light, et al. -based walkthrough, we analyze the advertised features of the 20 nudification applications in our study.
During an April follow-up, the team intentionally searched for terms such as “nudify” and “deepnude.” Their investigation uncovered 46 apps on the Apple App Store and 49 on Google Play. Michael Adler joins Akerman as the firm ramps up its focus on generative AI, both for internal innovation and client services. You’ll likely spot him on Bluesky (occasionally), Instagram (rarely), or devouring Buffalo wings (whenever possible).
(FOX 9) – Minnesota aims to curb the misuse of AI nudification tools against unsuspecting individuals, banning them effective August 1, 2026. While OpenAI and Anthropic staff reduce their public presence, Chinese AI researchers dominate X to share findings, attract talent, and steer global AI discourse. “None of these apps market themselves as nudification tools,” the research notes. (Google’s Jackson confirms) the company has already removed most of the apps flagged by TTP. The apps analyzed were reportedly downloaded collectively around 480 million times, generating approximately $120 million in total revenue. Apple states to WIRED that developers hold full responsibility for their app content, with violators facing removal.