Tech
Apple and Google ordered to purge ‘nudify’ apps from App Stores
The city of San Francisco has ordered Apple and Google to remove dozens of “nudify” apps — — software programs that can digitally alter pictures to unclothe the people in them — from their app stores.
California law criminalizes any activity that “knowingly facilitates” or “recklessly aids or abets” the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. In 2025, California also passed a law that allows victims to pursue civil actions against third-party facilitators of such material. The city says that, despite these well-known regulations, both tech companies have continued to host and make money from such programs.
“Apple and Google are profiting off apps that exploit women and girls by generating nonconsensual intimate deepfakes,” San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “While the companies cut ties with some problematic apps, Apple and Google have a responsibility to be proactive and vigilant to prevent sexual abuse.”
Letters sent to Google and Apple by Chiu’s office, which were viewed by TechCrunch, note that the companies have “been on notice” for their role in “processing payments for illegal purchases for almost a year” but have, nevertheless, continued to do so.
According to the letters, both companies have been repeatedly warned that they are hosting these apps. In January and again in April, the Tech Transparency Project issued reports and sent letters to both companies noting that there were “dozens of apps” within their app stores that “sold deepfake NCII [non-consensual intimate images] in exchange for payments” from processed by the firms.
TTP’s report from April said that Google and Apple had intentionally “steered” users towards such apps and called both companies “key participants in the spread of AI tools that can turn real people into sexualized images.”
Additionally, Chiu told Wired that both companies had likely made “millions of dollars in fees” from apps that offered such services.
The letters from Chiu’s office warn that Apple and Google could face civil penalties for violating the law and request that they contact the city within 28 days.
When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an Apple spokesperson said that nudify apps were forbidden from appearing in its App Store, further noting: “We have removed three of the apps in question and are in the process of terminating their developer accounts from our program. We are in contact with four others that need to address policy violations or risk being removed as well.”
A Google spokesperson claimed that all five Play apps referenced in Chiu’s letter had been suspended from Google Play. “When violations are reported to us, 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,” the spokesperson added.
Deepfake pornography has largely been a problem for female celebrities, although nudify apps make it possible for anyone with a publicly available photo to be targeted.
Update July 17: This article was updated to include statements from Google and Apple.
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Tech
Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators’ work without permission.
The strengthened measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, the company says. In addition, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creators’ content out of reach of crawlers. But more recently, the company introduced new discovery tools like a redesigned Home Feed and its tweet-like Quips, which could expose more content to crawlers.
The changes come about as more online publishers and content creators are coming to grips with how AI is ingesting their work for the purpose of making their AI models smarter. To combat this, Cloudflare now offers tools that allow website publishers to restrict AI bots, including a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping, dubbed Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month, it changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers, meaning those that both index and train on a website’s content, are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
Patreon says that it’s extending its existing work with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology to update its AI policies and enforcement tools. The difference here is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to scrape content using the robots.txt files — a standard way to provide bots with instructions on how they can use its site — Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” a Patreon blog post explains, referencing the stricter measures.
When testing the features, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” the post noted. That indicates that the AI scrapers were ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site anyway, despite its requests.
However, the company said that it will allow bots that index pages and organize information that can be used to send users back to Patreon.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” remarked Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
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Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
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