San Francisco Presses Apple and Google Over Nudify Apps

The San Francisco city attorney has kept up a two-year push against the AI 'nudify' economy, and the latest step, as reported by Wired, aims at the mobile app stores rather than at the sites that host the models. That is a meaningful shift from what came before, and worth pausing on.

The precedent is City Attorney David Chiu's August 2024 lawsuit against the operators of 16 AI-powered undressing websites, which his office said had been visited more than 200 million times in the first half of that year. Eleven of those sites have since shut down. Going after Apple and Google is a different fight. Those companies do not generate the imagery themselves; they distribute the apps and, more awkwardly, run the search and recommendation surfaces that lead people to them.

The broader context is that this problem has been documented over and over. Tech Transparency Project investigations found dozens of nudify apps live in the Apple App Store and Google Play, with a January report counting 55 on Apple and 47 on Google Play, and later analyses attributing 483 million downloads and more than $122 million in lifetime revenue to the category. Both platforms ban the content on paper, and both have taken down batches when pressed. After one TTP disclosure, Apple removed 28 apps and Google removed 31. The same searches keep surfacing new listings.

The honest caveat is that what I could confirm from adjacent reporting is the pattern, not the fine print of the notices San Francisco has now sent, and how many of the named apps disappear in the coming days is the tell. What the reporting does not settle is whether informal legal notices actually shift Apple's and Google's app-review workflow, or whether it takes another full lawsuit, on the distribution layer this time, to force a durable change.

The upside for the platforms is that this pressure gives them political cover to tighten AI-app review without appearing to overreach on generative AI generally. The upside for prosecutors and advocates, and for the coalition of state signatories that asked the National Association of Attorneys General to hold app stores accountable, is simpler: once a city attorney names specific listings on the record, the 'we didn't know' defense gets a lot thinner.