Civitai did not delete its adult catalogue. In April 2026 it split across two domains: civitai.com became the safe-for-work front door, and civitai.red carries the full catalogue including adult models. Your account, models and uploads stayed where they were. This page explains what actually moved and what it means for you.
What happened, and when
On 9 April 2026 Civitai published an article titled “Two Front Doors: Civitai.com, Civitai.red, and What’s Next”, and the change took effect the following Wednesday, 16 April 2026. That is the entire event, and almost everything people believe about it is a distortion of those two sentences.
The distortion is understandable. When a platform that hosted adult models for years suddenly serves you a clean, restricted homepage, the natural conclusion is that the adult material was deleted. It was not. It was moved behind a different door, and the door you were using stopped showing it to you.
The reason Civitai gave
The company was direct about the cause, and it is worth quoting because it explains why the fix took the shape it did. Payment processors would not work with the platform while mature content lived anywhere on it. In Civitai’s words, the shape of the platform was the thing they would not touch, as long as mature content lived anywhere on it.
That single constraint explains the whole design. Civitai did not need to remove adult content to satisfy processors, it needed adult content to not be on the property the processors were underwriting. Splitting the front door into two domains let card processors approve the safe-for-work variant on its own terms, while the rest of the catalogue continued to exist somewhere they were not being asked to endorse.
This is not a Civitai-specific story. Card networks have been tightening their position on adult material across hosting, marketplaces and creator platforms for several years, and the pressure that reached Civitai reached other platforms in the same window. If you have watched other sites quietly restructure their adult sections recently, this is the same force acting on all of them.
What lives on each domain
The split is cleaner than most people expect, and knowing which side you are on removes most of the confusion.
| civitai.com | civitai.red | |
|---|---|---|
| Catalogue | Safe-for-work only | Full catalogue, adult included |
| Payment | Cards and memberships | Crypto |
| Your account | Same login | Same login |
| Who it is for | General and commercial use | Users who opt in to mature content |
Safe-for-work content appears on both sites. Adult content appears only on the .red side, and only to users who have opted in. So the two domains are not two separate libraries, they are two views of one library with different visibility rules.
Your models, images and posts did not move
This is the part that causes the most panic and it is the easiest to settle. Civitai stated plainly that your account, your Buzz, your models, your images, your posts and your follows all stay exactly where they are. Nothing was deleted in the split itself, and nothing needed to be re-uploaded.
If a model you uploaded is no longer visible to you, the split is usually not the cause. Far more often it is one of the policy rules described further down, most commonly the metadata requirement, which hides content rather than removing it and can be reversed by supplying what is missing.
Buzz behaves differently on each side
The one genuinely fiddly detail is the on-site currency, because it is now colour-coded by where it came from and that determines where it can be spent. Green Buzz, bought with a card, stays tied to the safe-for-work side. Yellow Buzz, bought with crypto, lives on .red. Blue Buzz, earned through activity on the platform rather than purchased, works on both.
The logic follows directly from the payment-processor constraint. Money that arrived through a card network cannot be spent on the side the card networks declined to underwrite. If your balance seems to have shrunk, check which colour you are holding and which domain you are looking at before assuming anything was taken.
The policy changes people confuse with the split
A second set of changes landed around the same period, and because they arrived close together most people have merged them into one event. They are separate, and the difference matters when you are trying to work out why a specific model vanished.
Under a terms update dated 23 April 2025, several categories were banned outright rather than moved. These include incest, depictions of self-harm such as anorexia and bulimia, content promoting hate or extremist ideologies, and bodily excretions. Explicit content is additionally prohibited where it involves firearms pointed at people, vomit, illegal substances, or altered mental states such as being drunk, drugged, hypnotised or mind-controlled. Content in these categories is not on .red either. It is gone from the platform.
The metadata rule, which hides rather than deletes
This is the rule that catches the most people and it is entirely recoverable. All sexualised content must carry generation metadata, at minimum the prompt used. Content without it is hidden from public view and flagged with an alert rather than removed.
The practical consequence is that a large amount of older material became invisible overnight, not because anyone judged it, but because it was uploaded in an era when nobody attached prompts. If something of yours disappeared, this is the first thing to check, and supplying the missing metadata is usually enough to bring it back.
It is also a decent argument for keeping your own generation parameters rather than relying on a platform to remember them for you. If you work locally you already have them, which is one of several reasons the local route is worth learning. Our ComfyUI guide and the checkpoint guide both cover keeping that information with your outputs.
Feed filtering changed again in May 2026
A further adjustment in May 2026 widened an existing filter. Content tagged with child or minor themes is now filtered out of feeds whenever mature browsing is enabled at any level, meaning R as well as X and XXX. Previously that filtering applied only to the two most explicit tiers.
Separately, content tagged as depicting real people or celebrities is hidden from feeds, celebrity names are blocked while mature browsing is enabled, and monetisation features including ads, tipping and Early Access are disabled on real-likeness content. If you are wondering why a search for a public figure returns nothing on a mature browsing level, that is why, and it is deliberate.
The timeline, so you can place your own experience on it
A lot of the confusion comes from people encountering these changes months apart and assuming each one was a fresh crisis. Laid out in order, the sequence is short and the events are distinct.
The terms of service update dated 23 April 2025 is the earliest of the changes and the only one that removed anything permanently. It defined the banned categories that remain banned across both domains today. Everything after it is about visibility rather than deletion.
The metadata requirement for sexualised content belongs to the same body of policy work and is the change with the widest blast radius, because it applied retroactively to material uploaded long before anyone was expected to attach prompts. Nothing was deleted by it, but a great deal became invisible, which to an ordinary user looks identical.
The domain split was announced on 9 April 2026 and took effect on 16 April 2026. This is the one that changed what the site looks like when you arrive, and consequently the one most people noticed first, even though it came after the rules that had already reshaped the catalogue.
The feed filtering widened in May 2026, extending the child and minor theme filter to the R browsing level rather than only the two explicit tiers. If your experience of the site changed in early summer rather than in April, this is the more likely cause.
What to actually do about it
If you want a short list rather than analysis, this is the order that resolves the most cases with the least effort.
Start by working out which domain you are on, because a surprising number of people describing missing content are simply on the safe-for-work side and have not registered the change. Then check whether mature browsing is enabled on your account, since the adult catalogue stays invisible until you opt in even on the correct domain.
If something specific of yours is missing after both of those, check it against the banned categories first, then against the metadata rule. The first case is final, the second is recoverable and is by far the more common of the two.
Finally, and independently of any of this, download the models you actually rely on and keep them somewhere you control. This is the only step on the list that protects you against the next policy change as well as this one, and it costs nothing but disk space. A platform responding to its payment processors is not making decisions about you, which is precisely why you cannot predict or appeal them.
What this means depending on who you are
The split lands very differently on different users, and the useful question is which of these you are.
If you only ever downloaded safe-for-work models, essentially nothing changed. The site you already use is the site you keep using, and the restrictions you have read about do not touch your workflow.
If you downloaded adult models occasionally, the change is one of access rather than availability. The catalogue still exists, you reach it through a different door, and you have to opt in to see it. The friction is real but it is friction, not loss.
If you were a heavy uploader of adult content, this is a more serious change, and the honest summary is that your reach and your monetisation options both narrowed. Your material is intact, but the audience that finds it by casually browsing the main domain is smaller than it was, and several revenue features are unavailable on categories that were previously fine.
If your reflex is to look elsewhere
That is a reasonable reflex, but it is worth separating two different motivations, because they lead to different places. If you want a catalogue that is not subject to a payment processor’s preferences, the durable answer is not another hosted marketplace, it is keeping models locally where nobody can change the rules under you. We cover that route in the checkpoint guide.
If you simply want to generate images without maintaining an installation, a hosted generator is the pragmatic option, and something like AI Nudez runs in the browser with no setup. It is worth being clear-eyed that any hosted service sits under the same commercial pressures Civitai just responded to, so this solves convenience rather than durability.
If you want a comparison of the model hosts themselves, we keep that separately in Civitai alternatives, and there are head-to-head breakdowns in Civitai vs Hugging Face and Civitai vs SeaArt. Those pages compare platforms. This one explains what happened to the one you were already using.
How to tell which problem you actually have
Three different failures get described in the same words, and they have three different fixes.
If the whole site is unreachable or erroring, that is an availability problem and has nothing to do with the split. We cover that in Civitai not working.
If the site loads but adult content is absent, you are on the safe-for-work domain, or you have not opted in to mature browsing, or both. That is the split doing exactly what it was built to do.
If the site loads, mature browsing is on, and one specific model is still missing, it is a policy matter rather than a domain matter. Check whether it falls into a banned category, in which case it is gone, or whether it is missing generation metadata, in which case it is hidden and recoverable.
Working through those three in order will resolve almost every version of “Civitai removed my models” without guesswork.
Whether this is likely to stick
Some honesty is warranted here, because nobody can tell you what a payment network will decide next year. What can be said is that the pressure driving this is structural rather than a passing mood. Card networks have been narrowing their tolerance for adult material for several years, and platforms have consistently responded by separating rather than deleting, because separating preserves the catalogue and the audience while satisfying the constraint.
That pattern suggests the two-door arrangement is stable for as long as the underlying constraint holds, and that further tightening, if it comes, is more likely to touch what is allowed in the catalogue than to undo the split. The practical implication for you is unglamorous and reliable: anything you genuinely depend on is worth having a local copy of. Platforms respond to pressures that have nothing to do with you, and they do it on their schedule.
For that reason the most useful reaction to this change is not choosing a different host but reducing how much any host matters. If you want a starting point, AI Nudez covers the no-setup case, and our ComfyUI guide covers the case where you want the whole pipeline on your own machine.
Frequently asked questions
Did Civitai delete all its NSFW content
No. In April 2026 the adult catalogue moved behind a second domain, civitai.red, while civitai.com became the safe-for-work front door. Specific categories were banned outright under a separate policy update, but the catalogue as a whole was not deleted.
What is civitai.red
It is the second of Civitai’s two front doors, announced on 9 April 2026 and live from 16 April 2026. Civitai describes it as carrying the full catalogue including adult content, with crypto rather than card payments.
Do I need a new account for civitai.red
No. Civitai stated that accounts are unified and that your Buzz, models, images, posts and follows all stay exactly where they are. The same login works on both domains.
Why did my model disappear from Civitai
Most often because it lacks generation metadata. All sexualised content must carry at minimum the prompt used, and content without it is hidden from public view rather than deleted, so supplying the missing information usually restores it. If the model falls into a banned category such as incest, self-harm or bodily excretions, it is removed rather than hidden.
Why can I not find celebrity models any more
Content tagged as depicting real people is hidden from feeds, and celebrity names are blocked while mature browsing is enabled. Monetisation features including ads, tipping and Early Access are also disabled on real-likeness content.
Why did Civitai split the site in the first place
Payment processors would not work with the platform while mature content lived anywhere on it. Separating the domains let card processors approve the safe-for-work side independently, without the company having to delete the rest of the catalogue.
