On August 18, 2026, WIRED reported that Meta ran a paid advertising campaign for Kromix, an AI image-generation app that promoted itself with a pornographic deepfake of a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician. According to WIRED's Vittoria Elliott and Matt Burgess, one video ad showed the politician's likeness in front of a US flag under the caption "What if she moved?" before cutting to the same face performing in a pornographic video. A voice-over marketed the tool as having "no restrictions," said "all the characters are real people," and described it as "the AI that men actually use." Apple removed Kromix from the App Store after WIRED's inquiry; Meta pulled the campaign.

Why It Matters

The distribution chain for non-consensual intimate imagery now runs through the two most heavily moderated commercial surfaces in technology — Apple's App Store and Meta's ad platform — and both failed on the same product in the same week. That matters for the legitimate sextech industry in a specific, unglamorous way: every enforcement gap like this one strengthens the political case for blanket restrictions on adult-adjacent advertising, app distribution, and payment processing, and legitimate pleasure-tech brands already operate under ad bans that nudify apps evidently do not. When a compliant sexual wellness company cannot buy an Instagram ad for a body-safe vibrator while an unvetted deepfake generator runs 32 of them, the enforcement asymmetry is not just unfair — it is the argument regulators will cite when they write rules that catch everyone. Expect this to feed directly into the next round of app store age-verification and NCII legislation.

The numbers are small and that is arguably the point. Meta told WIRED the account behind the campaign ran 32 ads, exclusively targeted at male users under the tagline "Unleash Next-gen AI Magic," running between five and 46 hours each, with most receiving 10 or fewer impressions. The page was created on August 3, days before the ads ran, and had zero followers — two signals that a review system looking for them would flag. Most of the video ads used cover images of beaches, mountains, or waterfalls to disguise the pornographic content behind them, a now-standard evasion tactic. Apple told WIRED that Kromix appeared to have added the prohibited features after clearing initial App Store review, and reiterated that "nudification" apps violate its App Review Guidelines.

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, which discovered the ads, told WIRED that every nudify ad her organization has tracked so far has been "exclusively sexualizing and nudifying and putting women into AI-generated porn." Meta's head of women's safety, Cindy Southworth, responded that the company removed over 340,000 violating ads for nudify apps between November 2025 and January 2026 alone, has deployed new AI detection, and has sued at least one nudify app developer. Both statements can be true simultaneously — and that is the structural problem. A 340,000-ad removal rate is not a sign of a controlled system.

This lands squarely on top of an enforcement pile that has been building all year. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google in July demanding removal of specific nudify apps; the Tech Transparency Project's April report found 38 nudify apps across both stores with 483 million downloads. WIRED notes that officials in Sweden, England, and Northern Ireland were targeted with sexualized AI imagery in January, when Grok was used to generate roughly 3 million sexualized images of women and girls. Benjamin Shultz of the American Sunlight Project framed the mechanism precisely: official portraits and press-conference video have become "raw material for low- and no-code tools that anyone with an internet connection can use."

Sources

Update — 2026-08-26

{Initial entry — story first created.}