Australian eSafety Commissioner takes action against deepfake abuse sites

The Australian eSafety Commissioner issued removal notices to multiple websites hosting AI-generated deepfake pornography and nudification tools, following a 400 percent increase in complaints about non-consensual intimate images created using generative AI. The regulator confirmed that several sites had complied with takedown orders, while others were referred to international partners for enforcement. The Commissioner noted that minors, including school-age children, were among those targeted, with offenders using publicly available photos from social media to create explicit synthetic imagery.

Targeted enforcement against hosting infrastructure addresses supply but does not intercept demand or distribution at the peer-to-peer level, where synthetic abuse material is most often weaponized for coercion. Detection modules purpose-built for AI-generated CSAM and image-based abuse, such as those deployed by Guardii across messaging platforms, identify when a child is being threatened with or sent deepfake imagery in a direct conversation, enabling immediate blocking and escalation to a parent, school counselor or law-enforcement contact before the image is used to manipulate, extort or silence the target.