San Francisco sues deepfake 'nudify' websites

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed suit against the operators of 16 of the internet’s most-visited “nudify” websites, tools that let users upload a clothed photograph of a real person and generate a fabricated nude or sexually explicit image of them. The city’s office described it as the first lawsuit of its kind in the United States to target this category of site as a group rather than pursuing individual takedowns.

The complaint named six defendants: Estonian resident Augustin Gribinets, US corporations Sol Ecom Inc. and Briver LLC, UK-based Itai Tech Ltd, and Estonian entities Defirex OÜ and Itai OÜ. It alleged the sites violated California and federal laws against nonconsensual deepfake pornography, revenge pornography, and, where the fabricated images depicted minors, child-sexual-abuse-material statutes. The city’s office said the sites collectively drew more than 200 million visits in the first six months of 2024 alone.

Chiu’s office argued the images were “virtually indistinguishable” from genuine photographs and were being used to extort, bully, threaten and humiliate women and girls, many of whom had no way of knowing their likeness had been used until an image circulated. The suit sought injunctive relief to shut the sites down along with civil penalties, rather than pursuing individual users who generated the images.

The case became a template other jurisdictions cited in pursuing similar action against nudify services, and at least one named defendant, Briver LLC, later settled with the city and agreed to shut down the site it operated. It also fed into a broader wave of state and federal legislation targeting nonconsensual intimate imagery generated by AI, including laws requiring platforms and app stores to restrict access to such tools.