Oi, you got a loicence for that AI? UK’s idiotic Online Safety Act (OSA) intended to protect the British from the very harmful effects of Internet porn, forced CivitAI, the largest AI graphical model portal to ban users from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Here’s the official statement of CivitAI.com about the matter (highlights by me):
Access Restricted for UK Visitors
As of July 24, 2025 at 11:59 PM UTC, Civitai is no longer accessible to users in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
This is due to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which imposes strict legal requirements on all platforms with user-generated content. These include biometric age checks, complex legal risk assessments, and personal liability for staff. These rules apply even to platforms based outside the UK.
This is not a decision we made lightly. We began looking into what compliance would involve, but quickly realized it is not something we can feasibly manage with a team of our size. The legal and financial burden is simply too great.
We are heartbroken to block access, and we know this is upsetting. If you are a UK citizen, we encourage you to contact your Member of Parliament and share your concerns about how the OSA affects access to art, technology, and online communities. You can also learn more at Ofcom’s Online Safety Guidance.
We are truly sorry, and we hope to return in the future. Thank you for being part of the Civitai community.
While the CivitAI does indeed contain adult content and Stable Diffusion models allowing to generate porn, forcing companies to perform biometric age checks and complex legal risk assessments, even if they don’t aren’t based in the UK is backwards and regressive.
Without CivitAI, Stable Diffusion Wouldn’t Take Off
Model page on CivitAI (blocked in the UK)
CivitAI is the biggest and most important open-source graphical AI models portal, with millions of users and tens of thousands of models hosted on its website.
This is where creators share their base models, LoRAs, embeddings, styles, dreambooths – everything.
It’s also where researchers and hobbyists can experiment, learn, and contribute to the research in this field. CivitAI even allows users to create their own models, without having to set up rigs or use more complex cloud solutions.
CivitAI offers the simplest way to train your own LoRAs in a few clicks
With CivitAI blocked, UK users will will have to download models via shady sites (which is not safe, in general), unless they use VPN.
I still remember downloading nai.ckpt, a leaked Japanese model from the Torrent shared on 4chan. It was the original Stable Diffusion 1.5 model that started it all. It seems like the UK users would have to return to that.
Biometric Age Checks and Legal Gymnastics
And to be clear, yes – many models on CivitAI generate adult content. There is porn on the site, and the models with questionable names like “Photorealistic Succubus Womb Tattoos”, “Furry Enhancer”, and “Breast Size Slider (Flux)” (I literally took these model names out of the recently featured)
But the site has filters, warnings, opt-ins, and all the usual things you’d expect from a responsible platform. You can’t even see adult content without creating an account and logging in.
But under the OSA, that’s not enough. Platforms now have to somehow verify the age of users through biometric checks like facial recognition and document scans, which is stupid idea itself, and it’s an invasion on privacy. And if something slips through, the platform’s staff will be held personally liable.
Meanwhile, the rest of the internet continues as usual. Pornhub? Still there. Reddit? Full of porn. Discord servers, Torrents, VPN, Piratebay? Work as usual. UK now wants foreign websites to obey its laws as if the officials had a magic wand that stretched across continents. CivitAI has bent over, but Hugging Face, the second-largest graphical models depository, won’t.
How Would You Like This Wrapped?
There are thousands of problems the UK is now facing, but it’s easier to solve imaginary problems than real problems.
This is an act of cultural and technological regression. Censorship is typical for backwards societies, which the UK is becoming. It punishes the entire UK AI art community for no reason, and doesn’t tackle real issues. 
This time it’s “think about the children.”
Sleep tight, Britain. Your AI models are gone, but at least the children are safe. You know who to thank in the next elections.
