Apple's iPhone Keyboard Quietly Blocks 'Dictator Trump' and 'Sleepy Joe' From Autocomplete

Apple's iPhone keyboard carries an undisclosed list of tens of thousands of words and phrases that it will not suggest through autocomplete or swipe-typing — including politically charged phrases such as "dictator Trump" and "sleepy Joe".

The list is not a ban. iPhone users can still type whatever they like when writing emails and texts. But the words on the list will not be suggested to them, opening a window into how Apple manages the trade-off between keeping offensive or politically charged suggestions off its devices and anticipating what users are trying to say.

Hundreds of millions of people use iPhones, so Apple's choices about which words its keyboard suggests could quietly shape how they communicate. Apple has not publicly disclosed the list, according to the researcher who found it.

The flagged words and phrases are overwhelmingly vulgar or offensive, or related to drugs, sex or violence, according to independent researcher Derik Kauffman, who discovered the list recently. But other phrases are simply politically salient, like "dictator Trump" and "sleepy Joe".

Other phrases kept out of iOS predictive text include "right wing conspiracy", "Tibetan independence" and "United Ireland", Kauffman said. The lists differ by language. In Hindi, for example, the keyboard does not allow users to swipe-type "Modi braggart" or "Rahul is Pappu", digs at India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his leading opponent, Rahul Gandhi. French speakers could not swipe-type "immigration too high", and Hebrew speakers could not swipe-type "occupied territories".

"Every major language has some version of this," Kauffman said.

Kauffman said he found the list in September, after noticing that his swipe-typing — gliding a finger across the keyboard instead of tapping each letter — would stutter over certain phrases, like "bad boy" or "white man", but not "bad girl" or "black man". Curious, he used OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code to hunt for a reason, eventually finding a compendium stored deep inside Apple's operating system. A conservative estimate puts the list at about 100,000 words and phrases, not counting Chinese characters, though there are different ways to count them and their variations.

Reuters tested a small subset of the phrases Kauffman identified on an iPhone and found they were all difficult to enter through swipe-typing or were not suggested by autocomplete. Trying to swipe-type "United Ireland" or "Tibetan independence" often produced "United Iceland" or "Tibetan independences". Trying to swipe-type "white man" produced "white mean", while "red man" or "blue man" could be swipe-typed without difficulty. "Sleepy Joe" became "Sleepy hope". "Dictator Trump" could be swipe-typed, but "trump" appeared in lowercase and the phrase was not suggested in autocomplete — the keyboard instead suggested "dictator trumps". Swipe-typing "read gay smut" produced "Read gay Smit", while "read smut" on its own worked fine.

Matt Suiche, an engineer at agentic AI cybersecurity company Tolmo, said he was able to independently recover the same gray list and cross-reference Kauffman's findings against Apple's internal data, with a near-perfect match. He said the list had been hidden in plain sight for years, offering a look at how "human communication has been potentially influenced and filtered for years inside messaging apps".

Kauffman is not the only one to have noticed the iOS keyboard's nudges. Earlier in the week, a Norwegian systems administrator independently discovered words on Apple's gray list, including "al-Qaeda", "Auschwitz" and "Hooters", though the wider list of sensitive phrases is reported here for the first time.

In an email, Apple did not comment directly on Kauffman's findings, including the size or composition of the list, or its reasons for flagging certain political terms. It said iPhone users always had the option to type specific words and phrases and could always override predictive text suggestions, and that its keyboard was set up to avoid offering suggestions that might be inappropriate or offensive.

Kauffman said it was understandable that Apple wanted to keep users from accidentally sending obscene messages or inflammatory slogans, but pointed to inconsistencies in how the feature is applied. "It's a very light-touch form of censorship," he said. "But at the scale that Apple is operating, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact."

David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, said that while part of him found the word list "creepy" and he wondered about Apple's judgment calls, he could see an argument for it as a way to curb unwanted or inflammatory suggestions. "But if they are going to do it, this is something users should be really well aware of and have some ability to customize," Greene said. "This is something that should not be secret."

Apple has run into trouble with predictive technology before. Last year, users reported that dictating the word "racist" to their iPhones would briefly cause the word "Trump" to flash across their screens. Apple said at the time that the problem was an error and had been fixed.

Sources

• Reuters — Apple's autocomplete restrictions include 'Dictator Trump' and 'Sleepy Joe,' researcher finds