Operation Choke Point, AI edition
Operation Choke Point never died. It simply mutated.
Back in 2013 the Obama-era program leaned on banks to starve politically politically unwanted businesses. Today, the same squeeze is being applied to the lifeblood of open-source AI, only this time the culprits wear the badges of Visa, Mastercard and a swarm of compliance officers who wield the term “reputational risk” like a baseball bat.
The platform’s sin is neither fraud nor money-laundering. Its sin is permitting code that can create naughty pictures
CivitAI, for the uninitiated, is the world’s largest bazaar of community-built diffusion models: three-million-plus checkpoints, LoRAs and embeddings, most free, all fork-friendly. It is the GitHub of generative imagery, the place where hobbyists post that new anime style and researchers test a the latest face-swaps. The platform’s sin is neither fraud nor money-laundering. Its sin is permitting code that can create naughty pictures, a thought-crime under the new morality of Silicon Valley’s corporate clergy.
Community Engagement Manager Alasdair Nicoll, reveals that card payments for CivitAI (whose ‘buzz’ virtual money system is mostly powered by real-world credit and debit cards) will be halted from this Friday (May 23rd, 2025).
This will prevent users from renewing monthly memberships or buying new buzz.
No Buzz purchases, no new memberships. Exactly the sort of slow suffocation Choke Point was designed to achieve.
Why now? Because Westminster is eager to prove it can out-nanny Brussels. The Online Safety Act enters enforcement on 25 July, buttressed by a new criminal offence for merely creating an explicit deepfake. TechCrunch notes that the Ministry of Justice wants to “make the act of creating sexually explicit ‘deepfake’ images a specific criminal offence,” extending last year’s ban on sharing such content. Rather than fight another British speech law, CivitAI will simply geofence an entire nation. A private embargo imposed by the same credit card companies who once boasted about being “everywhere you want to be.”
Listen to CivitAI’s own community manager describing the ultimatum he received from the card cartels:
“These are not changes that we wanted to make. This boils down to new and impending legislation. There’s deepfake laws out there, there’s AI porn laws…payment processors, and ultimately Visa and MasterCard are spooked; they don’t want to be sued, and they’re ultimately driving these changes.
Some of the other options that we were given were removing not-safe-for-work altogether; removing x and triple-x content off of CivitAI and on to a completely new platform, and then geo-blocking that platform, because over half the US states require some form of porn geo-blocking, [as well as] many Asian countries and the United Kingdom…
‘The third option was going full crypto, crypto payments only…so there were literally no good options for this.”
Sound familiar? Here is David Kopel on the original playbook:
“The Obama administration unleashed Operation Choke Point in 2011 in an attempt to debank, and thus destroy, politically disfavored businesses. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued a guidance document warning banks about “merchant categories that have been associated with high-risk activity.”
The “high-risk” activity was not high risk that a banking client might use his or her account for something illegal, such as money laundering, for which there are already extensive regulations from the Treasury Department units […] To the contrary, “high risk” was claimed to include the amorphous concept of “reputation risk.” That is, a banking client might be politically unpopular, and so the bank’s reputation might be harmed.”
Swap “firearms dealers” for “open-source model hubs” and the tactics are identical. A few phone calls, a whiff of future regulation, and the digital panopticon’s turnstiles snap shut. No statute, no due process, just “guidance.”
Crypto, the very sector that endured Choke Point 2.0, has become the refuge for AI
Now, CivitAI can still sell tokens, if you first pass through Tether or Ethereum. Crypto, the very sector that endured Choke Point 2.0, has become the refuge for AI. Give it six months and expect the Financial Conduct Authority to discover “reputation risk” there, too.
Remember: CivitAI is not Facebook. It hosts files, not user feeds. When such a neutral repository is throttled, the target is not porn but permissionless innovation itself. Stable Diffusion was born in the open. So was LLaMA, Mistral, and every grassroots fork that followed. Smother the mirrors and you snuff out the next revolution before it leaves the lab.
Bureaucrats learned the lesson: never write memos when you can outsource the censorship to corporate middlemen.
Operation Choke Point was exposed once before, yet bureaucrats learned the lesson: never write memos when you can outsource the censorship to corporate middlemen. If they can unbank gun shops and AI coders, they can unbank anyone who offends the ruling narrative. The squeeze on CivitAI is the canary. Heed its silence.
They came for the gun stores and you shrugged. They come now for the model repositories. Will you still shrug? Because the next knock will be on every decentralized, open-source AI project that dares to let the plebs tinker without permission. And when the payment rails are gone, all that remains is the dark-net and the cold comfort of saying, “I told you so.”
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Operation Choke Point for AI is about more than one platform or one controversy. When payment processors and compliance departments can squeeze legal tools and communities out of existence, it raises a much bigger question about who really controls open technology. Have you noticed similar financial gatekeeping in other parts of the internet, and where do you think this trend leads?