Bloomberg puts FLUX in the child-abuse supply chain; Black Forest Labs' own study ranked a model fourth-worst
Bloomberg's October 6 investigation puts FLUX in the child-sex-abuse supply chain, and a study BFL co-published ranks one of its own unreleased models fourth-worst of seven on abuse-imagery vulnerabilities. The same day, Google priced the guarded, logged cloud below FLUX 3's list price.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
The liability file carries BFL's own signature
Child-sex-crime investigators in the US and Europe named the FLUX models of Germany's Black Forest Labs among the open-weight tools turning up in their cases, alongside Stable Diffusion, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Hunyuan, in a October 6 investigation 1. The buried detail is BFL's own: a study it co-published with safety firm Cinder ranked one of its models fourth-most "violative" of seven open-source image models tested for abuse imagery, and the company said that entry was tested before release and not made public 1.
European authorities now track more than 500 open models and variants in child-abuse use, up from fewer than a dozen two years ago, and a former Thorn data-science lead calls open models the "primary mechanism" for AI-generated abuse material 1. Reports to the US tipline with AI links went from 4,700 in 2023 to more than 1.5 million in 2025 1.
AI-linked abuse reports to the US tipline rose from 4,700 to 1.5 million in two years
Data
| Reports with AI links | |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 4,700 |
| 2024 | 67,000 |
| 2025 | 1,500,000 |
The safety dial is a hosted feature
BFL's hosted API exposes a safety_tolerance setting, 0 strictest to 4, default 2 2, and policy head Ben Brooks says the lab is "committed to proving that visual intelligence can be both open and responsible", with "no silver bullets" 1. The download ships without the meter: FLUX 3's open weights are promised within weeks 3, and a prompt run on a private laptop reaches no log and no moderator 1.
Law is not the backstop. On October 2 the Eighth Circuit blocked Minnesota, whose nudification-tool ban carries penalties up to $500,000 per violation, from enforcing the law against xAI while an appeal runs 4. Stability AI, the previous open image leader, is already a defendant in a suit claiming it built its business on "the lucrative potential of sexually explicit content" 1.
Google cut prices into the wound
FLUX 3 Image lists at $0.048 per 1K image, $0.100 at 2K and $0.607 at 4K 5, with the half-price launch promo ending October 8 at 8am Pacific 3. Google answered on October 6 6: Nano Banana 2.1 generates at $0.0336 per 1K image and $0.113 at 4K on the standard tier 7, an exact halving at 1K and 2K that halves again in batch 7, with input tripled to $1.50 per million tokens 7. At 4K the per-image token count rose from 2,520 to 3,780 7, so that cut is a quarter, not a half.
Google's guarded cloud undercuts FLUX 3's list price at every resolution
- FLUX 3 Image, list
- FLUX 3 promo, to 8 Oct
- Nano Banana 2.1
Data
| FLUX 3 Image, list | FLUX 3 promo, to 8 Oct | Nano Banana 2.1 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K | $0.05 | $0.02 | $0.03 |
| 2K | $0.1 | $0.05 | $0.05 |
| 4K | $0.61 | $0.3 | $0.11 |
Who pays for the open premium
BFL is private; its product is trust on a meter. Alphabet now sells the logged, guarded alternative below the open lab's list price at every tier 57. Nvidia, which agreed in September to buy the open-model clearinghouse Hugging Face as its user base nearly doubled this year to 13 million 1, inherits the same ecosystem the investigators describe.
Three dates settle it: the promo expiry on October 8 3, the FLUX 3 weight release and the license attached to it 3, and October 29, when Google retires the old Nano Banana 2 endpoint 6 and xAI's appellate brief falls due 4. This outlet called BFL's edit-precision moat about to be given away on October 2 8; the liability file arrived first.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
