Taking It Down Means Taking On a Thriving Industry of Sexualized Deepfakes

When President Trump put pen to paper on a new law criminalizing the online posting of non-consensual sexual imagery, our government took a meaningful step to address an urgent public safety threat. The next challenge is confronting the thriving industry of commercial “nudify” services that enable this online abuse.

The bipartisan Take It Down Act is a comprehensive piece of legislation to stem the avalanche of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) on the internet due to the rise of generative AI, which can instantly transform any image or video into a photo-realistic, sexually explicit rendering of its subject. Victims of synthetic NCII range from school children to A-list celebrities; their tormentors include classmates, criminal sextortion scammers and online trolls. In some of the most tragic cases, teenage victims have taken their own lives.

Last week at the signing, President Trump called distribution of NCII “a very abusive situation” and added “today we’re making it totally illegal.” First Lady Melania Trump called the signing “a powerful step forward in our efforts to ensure that every American, especially young people, can feel better protected from their image or identity being abused.”

Better protected? Absolutely. But no law is without flaws, and critics are already voicing concerns about threats to freedom of expression, likely challenges with enforcement, and the potential for abuse—paralleling well-documented misapplications of the DMCA.

We see another possible blind spot: if enforcement centers primarily on distribution, it risks overlooking a core driver of the problem—the businesses that profit from producing non-consensual, AI-generated sexually explicit images of real people.

Powered by advancements in AI technology and a modern internet built for commercialization, the creation and sale of synthetic NCII has moved from a custom service available on niche web forums to a scaled online industry leveraging the same marketing and monetization tools as large scale e-commerce. This includes influencer promotions and paid ads on mainstream social media platforms and online payment technologies.

We have witnessed this alarming industrialization from the front lines. Graphika is among the world’s premier open-source intelligence providers, helping leading organizations navigate complex online issues and events. Two years ago, we first alerted leaders in government and Silicon Valley to the turbocharged growth of NCII, identifying a raft of providers openly advertising online to reach more than 24 million website visitors a month.

Since then, this online industry has continued to thrive largely unchecked. To be sure, some tech companies have made moves to remove NCII providers from their platforms and increase support for victims. Researchers and journalists have also conducted in-depth investigations to hold individual perpetrators to account. But for the most part, these businesses operate freely across the internet, leveraging all the affordances of the e-commerce industry to profit from the abuse of innocent people.

The numbers speak for themselves. As recently as May 7, researchers at Oxford University identified more than 35,000 downloadable AI image generation tools, many of which were explicitly promoted as intended for the creation of NCII. Graphika tracks more than 200 web domains that provide access to synthetic NCII services and tools to create custom AI-generated pornography. As of this week when President Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, the largest commercial synthetic NCII provider has received more than 11 million visits to its website so far this year.

As we all grapple with this latest technological revolution, the U.S. has an opportunity to take the lead on tackling one of the most glaring downsides of the widespread availability of highly sophisticated AI.

To truly “Take it Down,” we must ensure that businesses enabling the creation of synthetic NCII are held to account alongside those responsible for distribution of the content.