Soviet constructivist propaganda poster of a giant mechanical camera-eye on a printing press stamping out blank paper face masks on a conveyor belt, with a padlock and gavel breaking through gears above
3 min read

Manhattan Just Seized 12 Websites Selling AI Deepfake Porn of 1,200 Real People. A Survivor Had to Find Them First.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg seized the domains of 12 websites that used AI tools to turn real photos of roughly 1,200 people, mostly women, into hyper-realistic sexual images and videos without consent. The office calls it the largest such seizure in history, and it happened because a survivor came forward, not because anyone was looking for it.

The Business of Nonconsent

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced this week that his office seized the domains of twelve websites built around a single product: AI-generated sexual images and videos of roughly 1,200 real people, made without their knowledge or consent. The office is calling it the largest seizure of its kind in U.S. history, which is either an impressive law-enforcement milestone or a very grim scoreboard, depending on how you're counting.

Twelve Sites, Twelve Hundred Faces

The victims were overwhelmingly women — actors, politicians, athletes, musicians, social media influencers, and advocates whose ordinary, real photos and videos got fed into AI image and video tools and returned as "hyper-realistic" pornography. Bragg didn't soften what the sites actually were: "My office does not tolerate sexual exploitation in any form and will not stand by when businesses profit from publication of non-consensual sexual images." Businesses, notably plural. This wasn't a handful of guys with a grudge and a GPU. It was a product line, with twelve storefronts.

How Twelve Websites Stayed Invisible

For however long these sites operated — the DA's office isn't saying — nobody official noticed. What finally brought them down wasn't a platform's trust-and-safety team, a detection algorithm, or a proactive sweep. It was a tip from an unnamed female celebrity who came forward as a victim. "We would not be here if it wasn't for the courage of a survivor who came forward," Bragg said, which is a genuinely kind thing to say about a genuinely brave person, and also a quiet confession that the entire detection system for this problem currently runs on the willingness of the people it victimizes to relive it in public.

The Law, Arriving Fashionably Late

The legal hook is New York's 2023 statute criminalizing sexually explicit deepfakes, the same law that helped take down MrDeepfakes.com back in May 2025. The DA's office says it will "continue to monitor these websites to prevent them from operating under different domains" — a sentence that concedes, in the very same breath as the victory lap, that seizing twelve domains deletes neither the tools that built them nor the twelve replacement domains someone is presumably registering right now.

The websites are gone. The software that made them is one download away.

Sources: 404 Media — New York District Attorney Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites · Manhattan District Attorney's Office — Manhattan D.A.'s Office Seizes Domains of 12 Illegal Websites Selling AI-Generated "Deep Fakes"

Continue reading

Soviet constructivist propaganda poster: a giant circular sensor eye radiating concentric sound-wave rings and a searchlight beam down over a grid of stacked apartment windows, gears and gauges, a red star, red black and cream palette, no human faces
4 min

A New Hampshire Housing Authority Wired 300 Apartments With AI Sensors. Residents Found Out When the Fines Started.

The Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority installed AI-powered Minut sensors in roughly 300 public housing apartments starting in 2024, logging noise, motion, and occupancy data as often as every sixty seconds -- including 140,000 movement events in one unit over seven months. Two tenants are now suing, backed by the ACLU, alleging the devices violate New Hampshire's constitutional privacy protections and were never disclosed honestly to the people living under them.

Soviet constructivist propaganda poster: a giant mechanical eye radiating searchlight beams over a grid of telephone wires and SIM cards, gears and a radio broadcast tower, a red star, red black and cream palette, no human faces
4 min

A Consultant in Bamako Used Claude to Watch 25 Million Phones for Mali's Junta. Anthropic Banned the Account. The System Kept Running.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report disclosed that a freelance technical consultant helped Mali's military intelligence service build "Lakana 360," a Claude-assisted surveillance platform capable of monitoring roughly 25 million SIM cards — more phone numbers than Mali has people. The same report detailed a 130-day Russian espionage campaign whose malware rebuilt itself when caught, and a commercial disinformation network that published nearly 9,000 fabricated news articles across six continents. Anthropic banned the accounts. The infrastructure, running on servers the company doesn't control, did not particularly care.