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.
