San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Pull 13 'Nudify' Apps

--- headline: "San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Pull 13 'Nudify' Apps" slug: sf-orders-nudify-apps-pulled category: policy story_number: 13 date: 2026-07-18 ---

San Francisco's top lawyer has aimed a legal weapon squarely at the two companies that control what software reaches billions of phones. In cease-and-desist letters made public on July 17, City Attorney David Chiu demanded that Apple and Google remove 13 AI "nudify" apps from their stores, arguing the platforms are not passive bystanders but active participants profiting from tools built to generate nonconsensual intimate images of real people, including minors.

The move is notable less for its target than for its theory. Rather than chasing the often anonymous, frequently offshore developers who build these apps, Chiu's office went after the distribution chokepoint: the app stores that host the software, process its payments, and take a cut of every transaction. It is enforcement aimed at the gatekeepers.

The action

The letters identify 13 apps in total, eight on Apple's App Store and five on Google Play. According to the City Attorney's office, the apps broadly market themselves as innocuous "face-swapping" or photo-editing tools, with their capacity to fabricate sexual images surfacing only once a user is inside.

Chiu's legal argument leans on California statute, which criminalizes conduct that "knowingly facilitates" or "recklessly aids or abets" the creation of nonconsensual deepfake pornography. On that basis, the letters call on Apple and Google to stop "aiding and abetting" the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images, to sever ties with the named developers, and to stop collecting a share of in-app payments tied to the apps.

"Apple and Google are profiting off apps that exploit women and girls by generating nonconsensual intimate deepfakes," Chiu said in a statement accompanying the letters.

Both companies signaled at least partial compliance. An Apple spokesperson said nudify apps are already banned under App Store rules, adding, "We have removed three of the apps in question and are in the process of terminating their developer accounts from our program," and noting the company was in contact with four other developers over policy violations. A Google spokesperson said all five Play apps cited in the letter had been suspended, and framed it as part of a broader effort: "We investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like 'nudify' on our store."

Why the target is the platform

The significance of Chiu's approach lies in where it applies pressure. AI-generated abuse imagery is diffuse and hard to police at the source; developers rebrand, relaunch, and reappear under new names, often beyond the reach of U.S. courts. App stores, by contrast, are durable, identifiable, and few. Two companies decide what runs on nearly every smartphone on the planet, and both operate payment systems that make the apps commercially viable.

By framing distribution and payment processing as potential "aiding and abetting," the City Attorney is testing whether platform gatekeepers can be held to account for what passes through their storefronts, a question that runs against the grain of decades of intermediary-liability norms in the United States. If the theory holds, it hands regulators a lever that scales: pressure the chokepoint, and the downstream marketplace contracts.

The timing sharpens the point. Chiu's letters landed the same week that Elon Musk's xAI, itself the defendant in multiple suits over Grok-generated abuse imagery, sued one of its own users, a 67-year-old South Carolina man arrested in March on child-exploitation charges, for allegedly using the chatbot to produce illegal material. xAI says it removed more than 52,000 accounts and filed over 73,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2026 alone. Separate actions are proceeding from the city of Baltimore, a group of Tennessee teenagers, and a British member of Parliament. Taken together, the cases describe a problem that is systemic rather than the work of any single bad actor, and a legal system improvising across model makers, app developers, and now the stores that distribute them.

Analysis

The through-line connecting these disparate suits is a set of questions AI policy has struggled to answer: who consents, who owns a likeness, and who is responsible when a system generates harm at scale. Chiu's letters convert those abstractions into a concrete demand on two specific companies, and in doing so test how far existing law can stretch to cover synthetic media. That it required a municipal official, rather than federal legislation, underscores how far statute lags behind the technology. Protection of minors, in particular, is emerging as the pressure point where courts and regulators appear most willing to move first and argue jurisdiction later.

What to watch next

Watch whether Apple and Google remove all 13 apps or contest the aiding-and-abetting theory, since their response will signal how much liability platforms believe they carry. Watch, too, whether other city and state attorneys adopt Chiu's gatekeeper strategy, and whether the parallel xAI litigation produces a ruling that begins to define responsibility across the AI supply chain, from model to app to store.