Hi, I’m Jakob Stewart, a digital artist working with NSFW AI tools.

Today I want to show you something on the Civitai Terms of Service page.

If you download checkpoints or LoRAs from there, this one affects you directly.

Everything quoted below is the actual text of the document, copied word for word.

No paraphrase.

This post is me reading a legal document, not me testing a tool. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

What Section 9.6 Says

The Terms page shows “Last modified: Aug 26, 2026”.

Section 9.6 is called Content Moderation, and it lists what the document calls expressly prohibited User Content.

Here is the first part of that list, copied exactly as it appears on the page:

Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts

The list does not stop there, and the next two lines are the ones that matter most:

Any content depicting genitalia or female nipples/areolas in a sexual context

Sexually explicit or suggestive content, including sexual intercourse, masturbation, or other sexual activities

Note the word suggestive, because that bar sits a long way below explicit.

Much lower.

The Clause That Is Bigger Than the NSFW One

Most people are going to focus on the porn part, but the next clause matters more.

This one is also inside Section 9.6, and again this is the exact wording:

Content that uses, reproduces, or is based on the likeness of real people - living or deceased - including public figures, celebrities, influencers, and private individuals, in any context.

Read that ending one more time. In any context.

That wording is not limited to celebrities and it is not limited to sexual use either.

A face swap LoRA is built on the likeness of a real person by definition.

So is a LoRA you trained yourself on your own reference photos of a model who gave you permission.

By the plain wording of that clause, both of those are covered the same way.

No exception for consent.

When Does This Apply?

This is the part worth writing on a sticky note.

The Terms say revisions hit brand new users right away, but people who already have an account get a delay:

Revisions will be effective immediately except that, for existing Users, material revisions will be effective 30 days after posting or notice to you

The page carries a date of last modified August 26, 2026 at the top of the document.

Thirty days after that lands on roughly September 25, 2026, so put it in your calendar now.

Mark it.

So if you have a Civitai account today, you have somewhere around three and a half weeks left.

That is the whole window.

What I Could Not Verify

Straight talk about the limits of this post, because they matter here.

I could not confirm what actually changed in the August 26 revision, and here is why.

I tried pulling an older copy of the page from the Internet Archive to compare both versions side by side.

The Archive rate limited me and returned the same error on every single attempt.

Four tries, four failures.

So I cannot honestly tell you that “Civitai just banned porn” without seeing the older version first.

What I can tell you is what the page says right now, quoted above, carrying an August 26 date.

If those clauses were already sitting there back in June, the deadline math still holds for the most recent revision.

Either way, the date stands.

When I get a clean copy of the older version, this post gets updated.

Promise.

What I Am Actually Doing About It

Practical, in the order I am doing it.

  • Mirroring what I already use. Weights on my drive keep working no matter what a website decides. Licenses still apply, but availability stops being someone else’s decision.
  • Writing down the license of each model I keep. The model card and the license file, saved next to the weights. I have been lazy about this and it is going to cost me at some point.
  • Checking which of my LoRAs are trained on real faces. Under that likeness clause, those are the ones with a problem, and it has nothing to do with whether the output is nude.
  • Not panicking about the models themselves. A checkpoint you already downloaded does not stop working. This is about what the platform will host, not about what your GPU will run.

Where Else to Look

There is no clean replacement for it today and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

None.

Hugging Face hosts plenty of NSFW checkpoints, and each one carries its own license.

That is a separate mess and a separate post.

The honest answer is that this whole ecosystem has been leaning on one single website for years and that was always fragile.

Heads up: this is the second platform policy shift I have written about this month. It is a pattern, not an accident.

My Take

If you build on a platform staying permissive, you are renting.

That has always been true in this niche, and the pattern repeats every couple of years.

Payment processors did it to adult sites and app stores did it to companion apps.

Now the model repository everyone uses has terms that read this way.

Finding the next permissive host and moving everything there just repeats the same mistake later.

Same trap, new address.

The real move is keeping local copies of whatever you depend on, with the license of each one saved next to it.

Go download what you use before September 25. It costs you disk space and nothing else.

Want to be updated on tools and tutorials? 👉 Subscribe For Free👈

More tools I have tested live on NSFW AI Tools.