Opinion | We won't stop trying to ban nudification apps

Minnesota became the first and only state in the United States to ban companies from making nudification technology available, with the law taking effect August 1, 2026. Research from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security found that 96 percent of deepfakes are nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, and of those, 99 percent target women. The legislation prohibits apps and websites that use generative AI to create hyperrealistic sexual imagery from photos of adults or turn photos of children into child sexual abuse material.

A statewide ban on nudification tools addresses distribution at the point of sale but leaves the underlying threat surface unchanged: offenders who solicit, coerce or demand imagery from minors in direct conversation. The Guardii anti-sextortion module, deployed across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, detects the precursor behaviours that generate source material for synthetic CSAM, identifying escalation patterns, demands for photos, threats of distribution and coercion in real time and blocking the hostile contact before imagery is handed over. That targeted intervention protects the child without requiring every user to forfeit access or privacy, addressing harm at the conversational layer where it originates.