Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the seizure of twelve domain names hosting AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery, following action under New York law on the dissemination of non-consensual videos and images. The platforms hosted fabricated videos of more than 1,200 people and were built specifically to let users apply the faces and bodies of real people to create illegal pornography; they marketed themselves explicitly as deepfake pornography services. Bragg said the office knows of domestic-violence cases in which partners threatened to release deepfake material as a means of control, and that multiple victims had been unaware any remedy existed — the announcement was framed partly as an appeal for further complainants. Investigators found that several people under investigation used genuine photographs and videos of their subjects as source material. Bragg declined to say whether arrests or charges will follow, describing the investigation as continuing, and said the office would monitor the platforms and act against attempts to revive them on new domains. The action sits inside a widening enforcement pattern this digest has followed: Microsoft has sued developers who used its Azure OpenAI services to generate non-consensual intimate imagery of celebrities, and the European Commission has an open inquiry into a social platform whose image-generation tool produced sexual imagery of a minor. The legal significance is jurisdictional rather than technical — a single district attorney has demonstrated that domain seizure works against a service model built on generative AI, where the offendable material has no original file to seize.

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