Hugging Face hosts nudification tools targeting a former Trump cabinet official and other senior US political figures
The tools are explicitly intended for generating deepfake nudes of a former Trump cabinet official, sitting members of Congress and a top American judge, a Transformer investigation found
Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said he was visiting Washington “to talk directly with policymakers … about open-source AI.”
We don’t know exactly what he told these policymakers. But it’s safe to assume one thing was left off his agenda: that Hugging Face’s platform hosts tools designed to make deepfake nude images of a former Trump cabinet official, a prominent woman in the White House, and senior political figures on both sides of the aisle, including sitting members of Congress and one of America’s top judges.
Transformer has found one user in particular who hosts more than a dozen tools that are explicitly intended to be used to generate deepfake nudes of prominent figures in and around politics.
As well as those currently involved at the top of government, other political figures include former leaders from the US and elsewhere. They also include high-profile commentators, including some of the US right’s most famous voices.
One striking feature of the set of deepfake nudification tools found by Transformer is the prevalence of women close to the Republican Party or the right. The most high profile previous example of a political figure targeted by deepfake pornography was Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke out in 2024 about the impact seeing such images had on her, and has campaigned for laws to clamp down on their creation. Hugging Face hosts a tool designed to generate nude images of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
Transformer is not naming the other political figures featured as they have not publicly spoken about being targeted by the phenomenon, and has sent a list of all the links we found to Hugging Face.
The tools are “Low-Rank Adaptations,” also known as “LoRAs”: a file that fine-tunes an image model to produce specific outputs, in this case realistic depictions of well-known people. The filenames for all the LoRAs mentioned above show that they are designed to be used with “BigLust,” a model primarily used to generate pornographic images. None are age-gated.
All of this material violates Hugging Face’s content policy, which forbids sexual content “created without explicit consent.” It also forbids “underage nudity or any sexual content involving minors.” In both the US and UK, sharing non-consensual sexual imagery is illegal, and creating it is illegal in the UK and certain US states. But neither country has explicitly banned distributing tools to produce it like the ones Hugging Face hosts — though legislation to do so has passed into UK law and is pending implementation.
Investigations from Transformer and 404 Media last year found that Hugging Face hosted hundreds of similar tools for producing deepfake pornography of female celebrities.
While the company removed some of those tools in response to the investigations, Transformer has found that the site still hosts many others — including tools for generating deepfake pornography of some of the most well-known women in entertainment, along with many who became famous as teenagers. In 2024, some searches for Taylor Swift’s name were blocked on X after a deepfakes of her went viral.
Most of the users identified in Transformer’s previous investigation appear to still have their accounts on Hugging Face, though some or all of their content has been removed. That includes the user who was hosting a model explicitly aimed at creating sexual content featuring a teenage-looking likeness of an actress. (That particular model has now been removed.)
As Transformer noted, Hugging Face often portrays itself as an ethical AI company. In 2024, senior leaders wrote a piece for Teen Vogue which decried the scourge of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, calling it a “massively harmful practice.”
On Thursday, Delangue hailed Hugging Face passing a $100m-annual run rate. A year on from first being confronted with its role in the deepfake porn ecosystem, his company is still enabling it.
Hugging Face did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.