SAN FRANCISCO – For the women whose photographs were fed into AI nudify apps without their knowledge, Thursday’s legal action arrived after months of reports, requests, and unanswered correspondence. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent formal demand letters to Apple and Google, ordering them to remove dozens of AI-powered nudify apps from their platforms within 28 days or face civil penalties under California law.
The letters, issued Thursday, invoke two intersecting California statutes. One criminalizes the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. A second law, enacted in 2025, extends civil liability to third-party platforms that facilitate that creation, including the app stores that distribute nudify software to paying customers. Chiu said his office was prepared to pursue civil penalties against both companies if they failed to comply within the 28-day window.
Nudify apps use artificial intelligence to digitally remove clothing from photographs, generating realistic nude depictions of real people without their consent. The apps require nothing beyond an ordinary photograph: a school portrait, a social media image, a workplace headshot. The result is fabricated intimate imagery delivered within seconds. Research from child safety organizations and digital rights groups has documented the use of these tools against women, teenagers, and children, with cases involving girls as young as thirteen publicly documented in the past two years.
The Tech Transparency Project published a report in January 2026 identifying nudify apps available in both the App Store and Google Play. It published a follow-up report in April 2026 reaching the same conclusion: the apps remained, the revenue continued, and neither platform had acted meaningfully. Chiu’s office said both companies received those reports. The FBI counted $893 million in AI-facilitated fraud losses in 2025 alone, with researchers warning the figure understates actual harm because most victims never file reports. Thursday’s letters follow what Chiu’s office characterized as months of unaddressed notice to two of the world’s largest technology companies.
Apple’s response was immediate but narrow. The company confirmed it had removed three of the apps cited in Chiu’s letter and said it was terminating the developer accounts associated with those removals. Apple’s incoming CEO John Ternus, who is set to succeed Tim Cook on September 1, has signaled a more decisive approach to App Store governance, but Thursday’s statement made no reference to any broader policy change. The response stopped short of addressing how many nudify apps remain accessible in the store, whether the three named apps were among the most downloaded, or what threshold Apple applies to identify applications that generate non-consensual intimate imagery at scale.
Google’s response covered more ground. The company confirmed it suspended the five Play Store apps identified in Chiu’s correspondence. It also disclosed that it had previously suspended “hundreds” of apps for violating its policies against content that sexualizes real, identifiable individuals. The disclosure implies something the company did not say directly: if hundreds of apps reached enforcement status, the review systems that were supposed to catch them before distribution did not catch them first. Google did not address that gap in its response, nor did it specify how many nudify apps may remain available in the store beyond the five cited in the letters.
Chiu said that before his letters were sent, both Apple and Google had likely made “millions of dollars in fees” from nudify app downloads. That framing matters legally. According to TechCrunch, California’s 2025 third-party facilitation statute ties civil liability to the act of profiting from platforms used to create non-consensual intimate imagery. The legal argument is not negligence. It is that Apple and Google were paid participants in a distribution chain that generated fabricated pornography from photographs of real people without their consent, and that both companies knew it.
What civil penalties look like in practice depends on how California courts calculate per-violation exposure under the 2025 statute. The law does not impose a fixed cap; damages scale to the scope of the violation. If nudify apps in both stores generated hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads before removal, the cumulative liability exposure runs into territory where compliance is almost certainly cheaper than litigation. For companies that collect billions in annual fees from their app stores, the 28-day window is more likely to be treated as a compliance calculation than a legal confrontation.
The action marks the first time a United States government body has sent formal legal correspondence to a major platform demanding the removal of nudify applications specifically. Consumer advocates and women’s rights organizations have called for platform accountability on this issue for years, citing both Apple’s and Google’s existing policies against sexually explicit content targeting real individuals. Those policies exist. Their application to nudify apps had been inconsistent, delayed, and in many cases absent without external pressure. California has moved more aggressively than the federal government on AI governance for the past year, and Thursday’s action fits that pattern: state-level enforcement filling space that federal oversight has left open.
California’s legal framework makes this enforcement possible where most other state statutes would not. The 2025 facilitation law was written to reach platforms specifically, not only individual creators or distributors. Whether other city or state attorneys can replicate Chiu’s approach depends on whether their jurisdictions carry comparable facilitation language, and on whether Thursday’s letters produce the compliance or the courtroom confrontation that defines what the statute actually means. Neither Apple nor Google had indicated by Thursday evening whether it would dispute the letters’ legal basis, comply in full, or contest the scope of removal being requested. The 28-day window runs either way.
