San Francisco gives Apple and Google 28 days to purge deepfake 'nudify' apps

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu has sent formal demand letters to Apple and Google, ordering them to remove a set of AI "nudify" apps from their app stores within 28 days or face civil penalties under California law. The letters name 13 apps — software that digitally alters a photo of a clothed person to generate a fake nude image of them without consent.

The legal footing is specific. California law criminalizes knowingly facilitating or recklessly aiding the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography, and a 2025 statute lets victims bring civil actions against the third parties that facilitate it. Child-safety and digital-rights organizations have documented these tools being used against women and teenagers, including cases involving girls as young as thirteen — which is the harm the city is invoking to force the platforms, rather than the app makers, to act.

Both companies say they had already started. Apple said nudify apps are forbidden under its guidelines, that it removed three of the apps named in the letter, and that it is terminating the associated developer accounts. Google said all five of the Play apps referenced in Chiu's letter had been suspended.

What is not settled

The move treats the app stores as the enforcement chokepoint — the place where the law can reach a diffuse, fast-moving problem by leaning on two companies instead of hundreds of developers. That is also its limit: removals happen app by app, and nudify tools have a long record of reappearing under new names once the old ones are pulled. The 28-day clock tests whether platform-level pressure can outpace that churn, or whether it becomes a game of whack-a-mole with a legal deadline attached.