🛡️ San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Pull 'Nudify' Apps From Their Stores

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu has sent letters ordering Apple and Google to purge so-called “nudify” apps — software that digitally strips clothing from photos to fabricate nude images — from their app stores, escalating a long-running fight over who is accountable when platforms distribute abusive AI tools.

California law criminalizes facilitating the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography, and Chiu argues that by hosting and taking a cut of revenue from these apps, the two companies are doing exactly that. “Apple and Google are profiting off apps that exploit women and girls,” he said. The companies have 28 days to respond and face potential civil penalties.

The order follows repeated warnings from the Tech Transparency Project, which has documented nudify apps slipping through store review and estimated the platforms have collected millions of dollars in fees tied to them. Store policies already prohibit this content on paper; the city's case is that enforcement has been too slow and too easy to evade through renamed or re-listed apps.

For platform and trust-and-safety teams, this is a jurisdiction turning app-store curation into a legal obligation rather than a courtesy. It raises the bar from “we have a policy” to “you are liable for what you monetize,” and it will likely accelerate investment in detection pipelines that can catch nudify tooling before it is approved — not weeks after it starts trending.

Key details

• Who ordered it: San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, via formal letters to Apple and Google.
• The target: Nudify apps that alter photos to simulate nudity, used for non-consensual imagery.
• Legal hook: California law criminalizes facilitating non-consensual deepfake pornography.
• Deadline: Both companies have 28 days to respond and face possible civil penalties.

Why it matters

This reframes app-store gatekeeping as a liability question. If a city can hold Apple and Google accountable for monetizing abusive AI tools, every platform that runs a marketplace has a new incentive to detect and block this category proactively rather than reactively.

Source: TechCrunch. Reporting cross-referenced by Tech Bytes on Jul 17, 2026.