Open civitai.com today looking for a NSFW checkpoint and you will only find the safe stuff.
Nothing broke, and your models were not deleted. The adult side of Civitai moved to a second address, civitai.red, back in April.
I sat down with the Terms of Service of both sites, the versions dated October 6, 2026, and read them side by side. Here is what I found, plus what I would do with the models you depend on.
I am not a lawyer, so treat this as my notes on the two documents, with quotes where the wording matters.
What changed in April
On April 9, 2026, Civitai CEO Justin Maier posted Two Front Doors. The switch went live the following Wednesday, April 15.
Since then, civitai.com is the SFW site and civitai.red shows everything, NSFW included.
The reason is payments. According to that post, card processors would only work with Civitai if mature content lived on a completely separate domain, so .com got credit cards back and .red runs on crypto.
Your account did not split in two. The post calls the two sites “filtered views on the same database”, so you log in once and your uploads and follows show up on both.
What changes is visibility. A SFW image you post appears on both domains, and a NSFW image only appears on .red, for people who opted in.
One more detail from the FAQ: countries that were already geo-blocked (the UK is the example they give, because of the Online Safety Act) stay blocked on both.
What civitai.com allows now
Section 9.6 of the civitai.com Terms opens its prohibited list with adult content. The first line reads:
Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts
The same list also bans “sexually explicit or suggestive content”. Suggestive is a much lower bar than explicit, and in practice .com is locked to PG.
So if your work is adult, .com is simply the wrong door.
You may have seen people say the August 26 update to these Terms banned NSFW, with a 30-day countdown. I compared the archived copies from June and late August, and that update added a section about LTX Video license terms (Section 8.8).
The adult ban was already on the page in June. There is no September deadline and nothing new to rush.
What civitai.red allows
The civitai.red Terms have their own Section 9.6, and the adult block is gone. Sexual content with adult characters is allowed.
Here is what it still bans, in short:
- Minors in any sexualized context, including anime and cartoon styles, and photorealistic minors in any context at all
- Incest, rape and sexual violence, and bestiality
- Bodily excretions in any context (urine, scat, menstruation, diapers and a few more)
- In a sexual context, things like vomit, flatulence, drugs, and weapons pointed at people
- Self-harm, plus hate or extremist content
- “Nudify” tools, models or workflows made to undress real individuals
There is also a rule I think a lot of people miss. Section 9.6(j) says sexual content “must be accompanied by AI generation metadata”, with the prompt as the minimum.
So if you strip the metadata before you upload a NSFW image to .red, you are already breaking the rules.
The rule that applies on both: real people
This is the part that matters most to me, because it does not care which door you use.
Both Terms have this line, word for word:
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.
On .red it is item (a), the very first thing on the list.
It is also older than the split. It goes back to May 2025, when Civitai published Policy Update: Removal of Real-Person Likeness Content and pulled real-person models and images from the site.
The key words are “in any context”. SFW or NSFW, celebrity or private person, the result is the same.
That includes a face LoRA you trained on photos of a real model who said yes. I could not find any consent exception in either document.
The 2025 post even covers fan art of a character played by a celebrity (their example is Indiana Jones). If the face belongs to a real actor, it counts.
It also says Civitai is working on consent-verification standards that might bring compliant likeness models back one day. Today, nothing like that exists in the Terms.
Bounties asking for real people are banned too, under 9.6(h).
What you can do is invent people. If you are building an AI influencer, she needs a face that belongs to nobody, which is how I approach it in How I Train NSFW AI Influencers.
What I would do with your models
Nothing is gone, so this is not an emergency. But most of us keep our whole toolkit on one website, and its rules have changed every year or so.
- Download the files you actually use. A checkpoint or LoRA on your own drive keeps working no matter what any site decides later.
- Save the model page next to the file. License, trigger words, base model and recommended settings all live on that page, and you will want them if that page ever goes away.
- Check your own uploads for real faces. A LoRA trained on a real person cannot be on Civitai at all, on either domain.
- Point your NSFW links to civitai.red. A link to an adult model on .com lands on a page that will not show it.
If you use scripts or apps that download from Civitai, the Two Front Doors FAQ says the API still lives on civitai.com and also works through civitai.red. Existing integrations do not need changes.
If you are fuzzy on what goes where, I explain the difference in What Are Checkpoints and LoRAs.
Where else to keep models
Hugging Face hosts plenty of NSFW models. Its content policy restricts sexual content “created without explicit consent” and anything involving minors, and owners can tag a repo “Not For All Audiences”.
It is a file host, though. There is no gallery or on-site generator like Civitai, and every model there carries its own license that you have to read yourself.
Honestly, I do not know of a second site with Civitai’s size for NSFW models today. That is the best argument for keeping local copies.
Short version: NSFW lives on civitai.red now, and real faces are banned on both sites. Spend one evening saving the models you could not stand to lose.
I write these up whenever a platform changes its rules. 👉 Subscribe for free to get them, and check my list of NSFW AI tools for the ones I use.