nude deepfakes EU ban urged after Austrian MEP attacked

Schilling learned about the images a few weeks before going public, after the think tank, which was tracking this kind of abuse, alerted her. When she clicked through, she recognized the original pictures straight away. They had simply been edited so that her clothes were gone.

She said she felt disgusted, and that seeing a moment she had prepared so hard for being used to humiliate her was hard to take in. She calls it a form of digital violence against women, stacked on top of the sexist abuse and harassment that women in politics already face far more often than men.

Schilling says she has spoken with other targeted MEPs, and some of them are afraid to come forward. Her message to them is that they did nothing wrong: other people misused their photos. She hopes that speaking up will push governments to act against the companies that profit from these tools.

The new count of 50 MEPs builds on earlier research by the same group. That earlier report found 138 female members of parliament across 22 EU countries had been hit by deepfake pornography. It also found women were 33 times more likely than male colleagues to be shown in, or linked to, this kind of fake material.

The think tank describes deepfake porn as a systemic threat to women in European politics. Schilling puts the stakes more bluntly. If more women step back from public life because they fear this, she argues, democracy itself gets weaker. Young women thinking about running for office now have to factor in that it could happen to them.

A note on terms: a deepfake is an image, video or audio clip that AI has generated or altered to show a real person doing something they never did. A nudifier or undressing app is a tool built to do one thing, take an ordinary photo of a clothed person and output a fake naked version, often in seconds.

The EU ban starts on December 2, 2026, and it bans AI systems that create sexual or intimate content of real people without their consent. It also explicitly covers AI-made child sexual abuse material. It applies to images, video and audio.

The rule is not a separate law. It was added to the EU’s AI Act through a simplification package known as the Digital Omnibus on AI. In that same deal, lawmakers gave companies more time on the heavier rules for high-risk AI, which slip to December 2027. The nudifier ban went the other way and was pulled forward. When the European Parliament voted on the package, it passed by 569 votes to 45, with 23 abstentions.

The ban reaches further than the app makers. It covers:

• companies that offer these tools to people in the EU, even if they are based elsewhere;
• services that host such software and let users produce non-consensual explicit content;
• people who use the tools to make fake intimate images of real people.

Penalties can reach 35 million euros or 7% of a company’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. General image generators are not banned as such. The line is crossed when a provider markets a tool for this use, or lets it be used that way without reasonable steps to stop it.

Schilling and German Green MEP Terry Reintke started a letter to EU officials that 119 MEPs signed. Its core point: a ban protects nobody until someone enforces it. The letter says these apps let anyone undress a woman’s photo with a single click, and that their real purpose is humiliation and control.

The signatories want national authorities to close loopholes and workarounds that could keep the apps running inside the EU after December 2, for example by switching domains or hosting outside Europe. They also want governments to go after firms that treat this abuse as a business model.

The European Commission has answered. In early October a Commission spokesperson confirmed the ban applies from December 2, said it is ready to enforce it from day one with no grace period, and said this activity has no place in Europe.

The pressure has been building all year. In late January the Commission opened an investigation into X over whether its Grok chatbot broke EU rules by spreading illegal content, after it was used to make explicit deepfakes. Ireland’s data protection regulator opened its own GDPR probe into X in mid-February.

If you live outside the EU, the ban does not change the law where you are. It still matters to you in two ways.

First, many of these apps are run by companies that sell worldwide. A provider that wants to keep its EU users, or avoid fines tied to its global revenue, has a strong reason to block or shut the service. Second, the EU often sets the template that others copy, the way its privacy rules shaped what tech companies did globally.

The practical lesson is the one Schilling’s case shows: these fakes start from ordinary public photos. If you find a faked intimate image of yourself, keep screenshots and links as evidence, report it to the platform hosting it, and contact the police. Don’t share it further, even to warn others, because each share spreads it.