Apple faces claims of 100,000 blocked iOS keyboard terms

Apple’s iOS keyboard suppresses more than 100,000 autocomplete and swipe-typing terms across “every major language,” researcher Derik Kauffman found in a Nov. 6 report cited by The Verge and Reuters.

The scale makes the finding broader than a small profanity filter: more than 100,000 entries are withheld from predictive suggestions, while Kauffman said users can still enter those words one letter at a time.

Kauffman said blocked entries do not appear as autocomplete suggestions. In swipe-typing, where a user slides across letters to form a word or phrase, iOS may substitute different wording, the report said.

The list includes slurs, offensive terms and phrases linked to sex or drugs, The Verge reported. It also includes political or disputed phrases such as “illegal immigrant,” “dictator Trump,” “sleepy Joe,” “covid was a hoax” and “left wing conspiracy,” as well as “Santa isn’t real” and “iMessage isn’t working.”

Kauffman posted language-specific versions of the list online. He found inconsistencies, including a block on “bad girl” but not “bad boy,” according to The Verge.

Reuters reported that Kauffman used OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, two AI coding tools, to locate the list in iOS. Kauffman said on his website that the phrases were stored as a hash table, a data structure used for fast lookup, and that he converted it back into readable text.

Another researcher told Reuters they independently obtained the same list. Apple told Reuters its keyboard is designed to avoid potentially inappropriate or offensive suggestions, while users remain able to type what they want or override predictive text suggestions.