Apple's iPhone keyboard carries an undisclosed multilingual list of tens of thousands of words and phrases that its predictive text and swipe-typing features decline to suggest, research by a security researcher has found, placing politically sensitive terms alongside entries for vulgarity, drugs, sex and violence.
Derek Kauffman, the researcher who surfaced the list, found that the operating system's keyboard holds back the flagged entries from autocomplete, predictive text and glide typing. It is not a formal ban: users can still type any of the terms by hand into messages and email. Most of the entries concern offensive language, narcotics, sex and violence.
Among the English phrases affected are “dictator Trump” and “sleepy Joe”, referring to US President Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, as well as “right wing conspiracy”, “Tibetan independence” and “United Ireland”. In Hindi, the keyboard reportedly will not glide-type references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition.
The pattern runs across languages. French users cannot glide-type “immigration too high”, and Hebrew speakers are blocked from “occupied territories”. “Every major language has some version of this,” Kauffman said.
Kauffman traced the behaviour in September after noticing the keyboard stutter over “bad boy” and “white man” but not “bad girl” or “black man”. Using OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, he located the list “deep in the bowels” of the software. He put the tally at about 100,000 entries excluding Chinese characters, a figure that shifts with how word combinations are counted, while other accounts describe a list of tens of thousands.
Separately, Matt Suiche, an engineer at the cybersecurity firm Tolmo, recovered the same list and checked it against Apple's internal data, reportedly obtaining a near-perfect match. He observed that it had sat hidden in plain sight for years. Earlier this week, a Norwegian systems administrator independently found a smaller roster of flagged terms that included “al-Qaeda”, “Auschwitz” and “Hooters”.
Kauffman characterised the mechanism as a “very light-touch form of censorship”, cautioning that “it only takes a light touch to have a big impact” given the reach of Apple's devices. He also pointed to inconsistencies, noting that users can glide-type “read smut” but not “read gay smut”, and acknowledged that the company may have meant to stop people firing off obscene messages or inflammatory slogans by accident.
The disclosure adds to a longer record of scrutiny over predictive text. Google, owned by Alphabet, has faced criticism and litigation over contested autocomplete suggestions. Apple drew attention last year when users reported that dictating “racist” briefly brought “Trump” onto the screen; the company blamed an error and said it had been fixed.
(With inputs from media reports)