AI Policy

San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Purge 'Nudify' Apps From Their App Stores

Newaiera Desk · 2026-07-22 · 4 min read

The city has given Apple and Google 28 days to respond after demanding they remove dozens of deepfake apps. City Attorney David Chiu says both companies ha

The platform-liability question in AI just got a concrete test case.

On July 17, the City of San Francisco ordered Apple and Google to remove dozens of so-called "nudify" apps — tools that digitally alter photographs to depict people without clothing — from their respective app stores. The demand came in letters from the office of City Attorney David Chiu, and it does not read like an opening pleasantry.

The legal footing

This is not a novel argument being tested in a vacuum. California law already criminalises knowingly facilitating, or recklessly aiding and abetting, the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. A separate 2025 state law lets victims bring civil actions against third-party facilitators of that material.

That second law is the pivot point. It moves the legal exposure off the anonymous developer and onto the parties with distribution, discovery and payment infrastructure — which, on mobile, means two companies.

Chiu's letters argue that Apple and Google have been on notice for close to a year over their role in processing payments for these purchases, and have continued regardless. The letters warn of civil penalties and ask both companies to make contact within 28 days.

The paper trail

What makes this awkward for the platforms is that the warnings are documented.

The Tech Transparency Project published reports and wrote to both companies in January, and again in April, identifying dozens of apps in their stores selling non-consensual intimate imagery in exchange for payments the platforms processed. TTP's April report went further, alleging the two companies had actively steered users toward such apps.

Chiu has separately told Wired that Apple and Google likely earned millions of dollars in fees from these apps.

In his statement, Chiu acknowledged that the companies have cut ties with some problematic apps, but argued they have a responsibility to be proactive and vigilant in preventing sexual abuse rather than reactive to press coverage.

Apple and Google were approached for comment.

Why this case matters beyond San Francisco

For most of the generative-AI era, the enforcement conversation has centred on model developers — what a model is trained on, what it will output, what safeguards it ships with. That framing has an obvious gap: the model does not need to reach the victim. The app store does.

The San Francisco action targets the distribution and monetisation layer instead. Whoever hosts the app, ranks it in search, and takes a cut of the payment is treated as a participant, not a bystander.

If that theory holds up, it changes the compliance calculus for every large app marketplace — not because the underlying conduct is newly illegal, but because the enforcement is newly aimed at the entities with the money and the ability to act at scale.

The scale problem underneath

Deepfake sexual imagery was, for years, largely a problem for high-profile women, where the volume of available source photographs made targeting feasible. Consumer nudify apps collapsed that barrier. Anyone with a publicly visible photograph can now be targeted by someone with a phone.

That is the shift regulators are reacting to, and it explains why the pressure is landing on the two chokepoints that could realistically reduce the supply: the stores, and the payment rails they run.

The 28-day clock is running. How Apple and Google answer it will tell us a lot about whether app-store review becomes a genuine enforcement surface for AI harms — or stays a policy document that gets updated after the story breaks.