A US federal judge has thrown out a proposed class action that accused Apple of failing to prevent images of child sexual abuse from being stored and shared on iCloud. The decision placed the claims under the liability protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Judge Noël Wise issued the order late on Monday, dismissing the case with prejudice so the plaintiffs cannot refile.

The lawsuit was filed by two survivors listed in court documents as Amy and Jessica. They alleged that images from their childhood abuse kept circulating through Apple cloud storage. Their argument centered on a detection system the company developed, unveiled in 2021, and later set aside.

NeuralHash was designed to compare photos against known abuse databases before upload to iCloud Photos. Apple paused the plan within weeks after researchers and privacy advocates cautioned that the scanning tools could be expanded later. The project was formally dropped in December 2022.

The complaint was lodged in the Northern District of California in December 2024 on behalf of a proposed class of 2,680 individuals. It initially sought roughly $1.2 billion. Updated filings raised compensatory damages to as much as $32.8 billion and asked the court to require Apple to detect, block, and report such material.

Judge Wise concluded that the plaintiffs essentially sought to hold Apple liable for not removing or blocking user-generated content. This placed the claims squarely within Section 230, the 1996 statute that shields online services from being treated as publishers of user posts.

She further noted that no federal statute obliges Apple to create or activate tools for identifying and reporting the material. Lawmakers can address this issue that contributes to child exploitation, she wrote, but this Court cannot.

Wise had previously dismissed an earlier version of the complaint while granting leave to amend. Monday's order concludes the matter at the district court level.

The plaintiffs are reviewing the ruling and considering next steps, one of their lawyers stated in an email. Another attorney for the plaintiffs indicated that an appeal is being weighed along with any remaining legal avenues.

This decision only adds urgency to the pending legislative efforts to ensure technology companies can be held accountable for the harm caused by their design choices, the lawyer added.

Apple has not issued a public statement on the outcome. In court papers the company pointed to alternative measures such as Communication Safety, which alerts children to sensitive images in Messages, rather than methods it viewed as threats to overall user security.

When West Virginia's attorney general sued Apple in February over comparable issues, a company spokesperson emphasized that protecting user safety and privacy, especially for children, remains central to its work. That case, filed in Mason County Circuit Court and described by the office as the first of its kind by a government agency, remains ongoing.

The attorney general's complaint highlighted reporting statistics. Apple submitted 267 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2023, compared with 1.47 million from Google and more than 30.6 million from Meta.

The ruling comes during a year that has examined the scope of Section 230 in other ways. Two recent cases bypassed the shield by targeting design choices instead of user content, resulting in a $375 million verdict against Meta in New Mexico and a smaller combined award against Meta and YouTube in California.

The issue Judge Wise returned to lawmakers is not being resolved rapidly elsewhere. Europe's Child Sexual Abuse Regulation has spent four years in talks over whether platforms can be forced to scan private messages.

For Apple the dismissal closes the larger of its two US cases involving iCloud and abuse imagery, two months after a separate $250 million settlement over Siri marketing in the same court. Any appeal would head to the Ninth Circuit. Apple has also sought to move the West Virginia case to federal court, arguing the state claims are preempted by federal law.