AI "Nudify" Apps Depicting Rape Scenarios Were Live on Apple's App Store

Apple's App Store hosted AI "nudification" apps that let users upload real photos and generate videos depicting rape and sexual assault scenarios, according to an investigation by The Independent.

One app, which The Independent chose not to name, offered users scenarios including "bedroom rape," paired with graphic videos illustrating the scenes. The app was free to download but pushed a $10.83-a-month membership and encouraged daily "check-ins" for rewards. It also let users type instructions to generate custom graphic scenes.

Apple removed the app after The Independent flagged it. The company declined to comment directly to the outlet but pointed to guidelines that prohibit "overtly sexual or pornographic content." Apple's App Store policy explicitly bars apps that are "offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy," and defines banned pornographic material as "explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings."

Apple told The Independent that several of the flagged apps had added features violating its terms of service sometime after they were initially approved and listed.

This isn't a new problem for Apple's review process. The Tech Transparency Project found 47 AI "nudify" apps available in Apple's U.S. App Store earlier this year. The Independent's own search turned up similar apps, including some named in that earlier investigation, still live on UK App Store listings.

Creating sexually explicit deepfakes without consent has been a crime in the UK since legislation followed public outrage over Elon Musk's Grok AI tool being used to digitally strip clothing from images of women. Pornography depicting rape or sexual assault has been illegal in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland since 2015. Labour MP Jess Asato, who had sexualized deepfakes made of her circulated online, is now suing xAI, Grok's parent company, for damages, according to The Independent.

The Scale Problem

A separate warning from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) points to how fast this is growing among children specifically. Report Remove, a service the IWF runs jointly with the NSPCC to get intimate images of minors taken down, received 420 reports in just the first six months of this year from children who believed images of themselves had been faked or manipulated into explicit content, according to The Guardian. That already exceeds the 397 reports logged for all of 2025.

Dan Sexton, the IWF's chief technology officer, told The Guardian the trend confirms fears the organization had when AI image generators first emerged. "If someone can take a benign image of a child from the internet and create child sexual abuse material with it, there is nothing that child can do to stop it from happening apart from preventing anyone from taking pictures of them, or not putting pictures of themselves online," he said.

The IWF said most of the manipulated-image reports made to Report Remove in 2025 and this year were severe enough to cross the legal threshold for child sexual abuse material, which is illegal to produce or distribute under UK law. Parliament has also made it a crime to adapt an AI model specifically to generate abuse material or to share such a model with others.

Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said the surge was foreseeable. "Tech companies cannot keep pushing out AI products without embedding strong protections that prevent this material from being created in the first place," she told The Guardian.

What's Actually Being Enforced, and What Isn't

The UK has criminalized non-consensual sexual deepfakes, and Apple has written policies that explicitly forbid this content. On paper, the legal and corporate frameworks already say no. In practice, apps offering rape-scenario generation were downloadable on the world's most tightly curated app marketplace until a reporter flagged one specifically.

Apple runs app review as a walled garden precisely to prevent this kind of thing, and the company deserves credit for pulling the app once notified. But relying on journalists to catch what an automated and human review process missed is not a policy. It's a failure being patched reactively. Apple has not said how many nudification apps remain undetected, nor detailed what changed in its review process since the Tech Transparency Project's findings earlier this year.

There's a legitimate free-expression and innovation argument that AI image tools shouldn't be banned wholesale because of misuse by a minority of users. Nobody serious is arguing that. The apps in question aren't ambiguous edge cases. They were explicitly marketed around generating sexual assault scenarios using real people's photos. Under both UK law and Apple's own stated rules, that crosses a clear line.

The open questions: how many similar apps remain live on Apple's and Google's stores right now, whether Apple will publish audit results showing what caught the app in the first place, and whether UK prosecutors will pursue any operators of these apps under the deepfake law now on the books. None of that has been answered yet.