‘Horrific violations’: Manhattan DA seizes 12 sites selling celebrity deepfake porn

The US crackdown on non-consensual deepfake porn cranked up a gear on Monday (September 14, 2026), when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that his office had seized 12 website domains it said were used for publishing celebrity deepfakes.

The office said the domains were used for “unlawfully” publishing and selling celebrity deepfake videos, including sexual content, most of which depicted women.

The sites featured deepfakes of actors, athletes, musicians and politicians, and weren’t shy about it (Bragg said they had names like AI Celebs, All Deepfake and Deepfake Porn). Nobody has been charged, but the office says its investigation into who ran them is ongoing.

In 2025 the Take It Down Act was signed into US federal law, and it criminalized sharing sexually explicit photos and videos without the consent of the people depicted, including AI-generated deepfakes. The Act followed a proliferation of sexual deepfake content being published online, aided by the rise of generative AI tools.

That federal law has started to show some teeth this year, with its first conviction in April, two men charged in May and the Justice Department using it to seize deepfake sites CFake and SOCFake in June.

Monday’s seizures didn’t rely on it at all (they came through a New York State Supreme Court warrant under state law), and Wired called them “perhaps one of the most significant and sweeping actions against websites hosting explicit deepfake videos since the technology first emerged at the end of 2017.”

More than 1,200 people were depicted in deepfake content across the 12 sites, according to Bragg, who said in a statement: “These horrific violations of privacy follow victims into their careers and personal lives and take an immense toll on emotional and mental wellbeing.”

Bragg added: “I want to be clear. We do not tolerate sexual exploitation in any form, including sharing and selling deepfake pornography.” He was realistic about what 12 domains achieve, though: “There are a lot of sites, there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Celebrities may dominate this victim list, but Bragg said many of his office’s intimate partner violence cases “involve threats to release images and videos, and we know that deepfakes are being used in the same way.”

The US isn’t alone in cracking down, either. In 2025 a man in Australia was fined AUD $343,500 (about US $225,000) for posting deepfake images depicting prominent women on the now-defunct deepfake porn site Mr Deepfakes.