An Apple spokesperson told WIRED that the company has removed Kromix—which, they said, appeared to have added prohibited content and features after initial review—from the App Store. “We have always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography,” they said. “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps—as well as the developer accounts behind them—that attempt to evade our processes and policies.”
Recently, WIRED reported how the Tech Transparency Project researchers had stumbled across more than 50 ads on Meta’s platforms that contained AI child sexual abuse material and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements. Some of these included “face-swapping” a child into a video where they were performing a sexual act. The ads, which ran between November 2025 and August, sometimes reached thousands of people, including those in the US, UK, and across at least a dozen European countries.
After WIRED contacted Meta about the ads last week, the company removed them from its ad library and replaced them with messages that they had been taken down for violating company policies on child sexual abuse and exploitation material, and adult sexual solicitation and nudity. Some of the ads were published after Meta told WIRED it had introduced new AI technology to “better detect and block violating ads at upload.”
Several of the ads linked to an app called MaskAI that appeared in the App Store; like Kromix, it included tools allowing users to upload images and face-swap people into sexual situations. The app was removed from the App Store after WIRED contacted Apple for comment; an email address linked to the app did not respond to a request for comment.
Paul says that Meta has increasingly relied on AI to flag and vet advertisements, while laying off human moderators. “Ads are Meta’s primary product, and there appears to be zero quality control,” she says. “Meta is also making a lot of statements publicly, banking on their AI and the sophistication of it, while simultaneously saying they use AI to review their ad library and nothing’s perfect.”
Additional reporting by Tim Marchman.