Spain proposes EU-wide ban on AI nudification tools following coordinated school sextortion cases

The Spanish government announced it will formally propose a European Union regulation banning the development, distribution and possession of AI-powered nudification applications, following police investigations into at least 28 coordinated sextortion rings operating within secondary schools across six regions in which perpetrators used widely available mobile apps to generate non-consensual intimate images of female classmates and then coerced victims into providing authentic material or payments. Interior Ministry officials stated that existing tools are hosted outside EU jurisdiction, are trivially accessible to minors, and that current content-removal frameworks do not address the point of creation or the coercion that follows initial image manipulation.

A prohibition on the tool itself does not intercept the coercive exchange that constitutes the harm to the victim. Detection systems that operate where the threat unfolds, in the direct-message layer where images are shared and demands are made, address the underlying abuse without relying on successful upstream interdiction of every application. Guardii's sextortion detection module analyses conversation patterns in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms to identify escalation, image-based coercion and demands characteristic of sextortion before additional material changes hands or the victim's distress intensifies, blocking contact, alerting a parent or school safeguarding authority, and preserving the evidence trail required for law enforcement action, regardless of whether the initial image was created using a banned tool, a legal editing application or a foreign-hosted service beyond the reach of EU enforcement.