Unfortunate Geoblock for UK Users

Jul 22, 2025 · 3 min.

Notice of restriction for UK users due to the new online safety act coming into effect on the 25th of July, 2025.

Temporary Access Restriction for UK Users Due to New Online Act Link to this heading

I dislike doing unexpected announcements. However, there is a situation for UK users as there is a new Online Safety Act we will need to comply by the 25th of this month. This caught us off-guard and we only discovered it ourselves when other AI websites wrote their respective announcements in the last few days. Due to the nature of the Act, and the legal complexity behind it, we will be temporarily restricting access to the website for UK users until we figure what is the best approach to deal with this.

The UK region includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When users from this region attempt to use the site, they will receive a custom error page displaying what is going on. We will like to keep this as temporary as possible.

Further Context Link to this heading

To read more about this Act. The information can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer

To summarise this, it is the UK government’s attempt to create a more safe environment for their underaged and adult citizens. However, the proposed implementation is overreaching and requires any services that deals with user interactions, or posting content, to have strict compliance requirements. This applies to any services even outside the UK as long as they have UK users.

Some compliance being:

  • Age vertification systems that requires actual biometric ID checks
  • Legal team to audit and assess the amount of risk all content on the site has
  • Increased moderation policies that needs to comply with the UK specific guidelines

Attempting to meet these demands from the UK government is frankly not possible and we are investigating if there are ways for us to be exempted from this so UK users can still have access to the site. This will take time that we unfortunately do not have.

We are going off the schedule located here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/important-dates-for-online-safety-compliance

What happens if we ignore this? Link to this heading

Fines. And if possible, if we are particularly negligiable, jail time. Ofcom, the body responsible for enforcing this Act, can put the team behind a service under criminal liability. These punishments can happen randomly at anytime by Ofcom. Getting into legal issues now, or in the future, will be a potential deathblow to PygmalionAI so I would like to avoid that situation from happening. Even if temporarily, UK users have to deal with restrictions.

What we will do Link to this heading

For now, to give us some time, we’ll go with the geoblock option. It seems that JanitorAI, ChubAI and Civitai have already done this decision on their end. However, we don’t host NSFW content, nor do we condone it, so we may be less subjected to the strict requirements in the Act. We’re still uncertain so we will need to look at the Act line by line. The team and I dislike blocking any users from the site. We will have an attempt at changing the site for the UK users so they can continue accessing without having to change their region. This is an attempt, not a promise, and depending on the complexity, it might not be done quickly, or in the worst case, at all.

Refunds available Link to this heading

If you are an UK user and you have an on-going subscription, we will be happy to refund your subscription. You can do this by emailing our support at support@pygmalion.chat and if that for some reason is unresponsive, please email teargosling@pygmalion.chat or tav@pygmalion.chat.