San Francisco’s city attorney has ordered Apple and Google to pull 13 AI-powered “nudify” apps from their stores, opening a new front in the fight over software that turns ordinary photos into fake nude images without a person’s consent.
City Attorney David Chiu’s office sent cease-and-desist letters to both companies on July 16, identifying eight apps on Apple’s App Store and five on Google Play. The apps typically market themselves as generic “face-swap” or photo-editing tools, but use generative AI to digitally remove clothing from photos of real people — overwhelmingly women and girls — without their knowledge.
What the letters demand
The letters go beyond a simple takedown request. Chiu’s office wants Apple and Google to terminate the developers’ accounts and stop collecting a cut of in-app payments tied to the nudifying feature, arguing the platforms are profiting from — and therefore legally exposed by — non-consensual intimate imagery. Under California regulation passed in 2025, anyone who “knowingly facilitates” or “recklessly aids or abets” the creation of such deepfakes can be held liable, and victims can now sue the companies that host the apps or process payments for them.
Apple and Google have 28 days to respond or risk civil penalties. Apple says it has already removed three of the flagged apps and is terminating their developer accounts while reviewing four more for policy violations. Google says it suspended all five apps named in the letter and has pulled “hundreds” of nudify-capable apps from Google Play over time as it finds them.
A pattern regulators are targeting
The apps first drew wider attention from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which flagged dozens of similar tools still live on both stores in reports published in January and April 2026, despite both companies’ policies barring them. Chiu’s office has pressed the issue before: it previously sued 16 websites that let users generate deepfake nude images of real women without consent.
The order lands weeks after the EU moved to explicitly ban AI-generated intimate deepfakes as part of its AI Act overhaul — part of a broader shift by regulators toward holding the platforms that distribute and monetize this software responsible, not just the developers who build it. AI News has previously explained how deepfakes work and how to spot one.