Apple has updated its App Store rules to spell out that apps where people make or share content must stop and take down intimate images of people made or shared without their consent, including fake nude images made with AI. Apple says nudification apps, which create sexually explicit images of real people without their consent, were already banned. In an update published on Friday, Oct. 16, Apple says its rules for apps that host people's posts now explicitly cover intimate images made without the person's consent, including images made with AI tools, as content that apps must actively prevent and remove. Apple says developers who do not put adequate safeguards in place, or do not fix problems once Apple has warned them, risk breaking its developer rules and being removed from the App Store.
The rule, numbered 1.2 in the guidelines Apple uses to decide which apps it accepts, covers apps that let people create, generate, upload or share content, and it names AI content creation apps alongside social media. Apps that host people's posts already had to filter objectionable material, let people report offensive content and let them block abusive accounts.
Apple also clarified a longstanding ban, now a rule of its own, on apps that hide what they do while Apple reviews them and then change after approval, for example by adding features that were not in the version Apple checked, a trick commonly called bait-and-switch. Apple says this is how some apps reveal harmful features such as nudification only after they are approved. Apps caught doing this can be removed from the App Store, and their developers can lose their Apple developer accounts. Apple says it has always banned apps that facilitate human trafficking or the exploitation of children and removes them from the App Store when it finds them. The rules now make clear that such apps will also be blocked from alternative distribution, the route for installing some iPhone and iPad apps from outside the App Store.
Apple says that last year it kept more than 150,000 apps with safety issues from reaching customers and closed more than 193,000 developer accounts for fraud and abuse. According to a news report, the changes follow criticism of Apple after people on X used the Grok chatbot earlier this year to make sexualized fake images of real people without their consent, including of minors, and Apple did not pull X or Grok from the App Store, though the report says Apple told senators it had threatened to remove Grok.
Apple has not said how it will judge whether an app's safeguards are adequate, or whether any apps now on the App Store will be removed under the new wording. Translations of the updated rules are due within a month.