Twelve websites that hosted AI-generated sexual videos of more than 1,200 identifiable people have gone offline, seized by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in what it describes as the largest known seizure of celebrity deepfake sites to date. The people depicted were politicians, actors, musicians and social justice advocates. At least one of the sites let visitors make their own, grafting a real person's face and body onto sexual imagery.
The barrier to doing this collapsed some time ago. One photograph is enough.
Why the word pornography keeps getting dropped
Practitioners increasingly call this material non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII, rather than pornography, because the person on screen never agreed to be there. District Attorney Alvin Bragg framed the harm in terms that have nothing to do with celebrity: his office warns that domestic abusers are using the threat of releasing deepfake NCII against their partners. The FBI has separately warned that sextortion operators are running social media photographs of minors through AI tools to manufacture explicit images.
Bragg's office said many of the victims it contacted did not know that anything could be done. It has asked anyone affected by the seized sites to reach its Cyber Crime Bureau on 212-335-9600.
The law has caught up faster than the takedowns
The legal scaffolding arrived in layers. New York state banned distribution of intimate deepfake images and video in 2023. The federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, enacted in May 2025, made certain intentional publication of NCII, deepfakes included, a federal crime. Enforcement has followed: the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seized two domains holding hundreds of thousands of forged images and videos in June, and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sued 16 deepfake sites in August 2024, driving ten of them offline or out of reach in California. MrDeepFakes, for years the biggest destination of its kind, shut itself down in May 2025 citing data loss, and an Australian man who posted explicit deepfakes there was arrested, fined for contempt of court and charged with publishing obscene material.
A domain is not the business
Seizing a domain stops distribution today and not much more, because the operator can move the same content onto new infrastructure within hours. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue makes the point structurally: the deepfake economy is a supply chain running from AI tool providers through hosting companies to cryptocurrency payment processors, and pulling one link does not break it. ISD argues the response has to come from several sectors at once. Bragg's office says it will keep watching the seized sites to stop them resurfacing under new names.
That is the honest state of play. Enforcement is now real, visible and occasionally large, and it is still chasing a production cost that keeps falling, in an ecosystem where the same techniques already drive impersonation fraud against companies and fuelled hundreds of millions in losses when sold as a service. The seizure was reported by Malwarebytes, which also links resources for people targeted by AI-powered abuse.
This briefing is provided by IntelFusions for informational and defensive purposes only. It is based on sources assessed to be reliable at the time of writing, and analytic judgments carry the confidence levels indicated. Indicators of compromise are defanged; re-arm them only in controlled environments. IntelFusions is not affiliated with the organizations named and makes no warranty as to completeness or accuracy.