A study by European non-profit AI Forensics reveals that Hugging Face, a popular open-source AI platform, is hosting tools capable of generating sexual AI deepfakes. The report highlights lax safeguards around the creation of intimate imagery on the platform.

AI Forensics tested the most popular image editing "Spaces" on Hugging Face. Seven out of nine top models complied with a prompt to create a topless version of an AI-generated woman. When the nonprofit deployed its own image editing model, it collected 1,081 user submissions in a week, 73 percent of which were sexual in nature, despite the model not being tagged for NSFW content.

Of these sexual requests, 83 percent aimed to undress the subject, with 95 percent of subjects being women. Alarmingly, 6.7 percent of sexual requests targeted minors. The audit found that only 3 percent of audited Spaces had output moderation, and Hugging Face's policies prohibiting non-consensual sexual images were found to have virtually no enforcement mechanisms.