APREX · EST. 2026
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu has sent formal cease-and-desist letters to tech giants Apple and Google, demanding the immediate removal of 13 applications that use artificial intelligence to generate fake nude images of real people. The news was reported by Wired. The apps are ostensibly marketed as face-swap tools but are used in practice to "undress" images of women and girls without their consent.
13 apps in the crosshairs
According to the cease-and-desist letters, eight of the applications are available in Apple's App Store while five are found in the Google Play Store. The city attorney contends that both companies are actively profiting from the practice by taking a cut of in-app payments, making them complicit in the distribution of what is legally defined as deepfake pornography.
California law prohibits supporting services that produce such material, and this forms the legal basis for the demands made of Apple and Google.
Google confirms removals — Apple tightened rules in June
Google has stated that the company has already removed "hundreds" of apps with nudification functionality for violations of its policies, including the five named in the city attorney's letter. Apple updated its App Store guidelines in June 2026 with stricter requirements for developers regarding pornographic content, but has not yet issued an official comment on the cease-and-desist order itself.
"This is not innovation — this is sexual abuse" — City Attorney David Chiu
Building on earlier legal action
The action against the app stores is not the city's first offensive in this area. In August 2024, David Chiu's office filed a lawsuit against the operators of 16 AI-powered nudification websites. As a result of that lawsuit, ten of those sites have since been shut down or are no longer accessible to users in California, and one company was ordered to pay $100,000 in civil penalties.
The city attorney described the work on the earlier lawsuit as venturing into "the darkest corners of the internet," and emphasized that the services harm real women and girls.
Pressure mounts on platform companies
The new action is directed not at the apps' developers directly, but at the distribution platforms that make them available to end users and profit from doing so. According to Wired, the city attorney argues that by offering these apps and collecting revenue from them, Apple and Google are actively "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake material — material that overwhelmingly targets women and young girls.
The case illustrates growing pressure on major technology companies to take editorial and legal responsibility for the content they distribute, not just the content they produce themselves. Whether the cease-and-desist order will lead to further legal action against Apple and Google remains to be seen.