Key facts
- Researcher Derik Kauffman said Apple's iOS keyboard gray list covers tens of thousands of words and phrases.
- Kauffman said the list includes politically salient phrases such as "dictator Trump" and "sleepy Joe."
- Apple did not comment on the size or composition of the list or its reasons for flagging political terms.
- Apple said iPhone users could always type specific words or phrases and override predictive text suggestions.
- Tolmo engineer Matt Suiche said he independently recovered the same gray list and got a near-perfect match.
- Kauffman said a conservative estimate puts the list at about 100,000 words and phrases, excluding Chinese characters.
Apple maintains an undisclosed multilingual gray list of tens of thousands of words and phrases that its iOS keyboard will not autocomplete or swipe-type, independent researcher Derik Kauffman said on November 6, 2026. The list is not a ban: iPhone users can still type what they like, but the words will not be suggested in most cases.
Kauffman said the flagged terms are overwhelmingly vulgar or offensive or related to drugs, sex or violence, but some are politically salient, including "dictator Trump" and "sleepy Joe." Other excluded phrases include "right wing conspiracy," "Tibetan independence" and "United Ireland," he said. Non-English languages have different flagged terms: in Hindi the keyboard does not allow swipe-typing "Modi braggart" or "Rahul is Pappu," digs at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, according to Kauffman. He said French speakers could not swipe-type "immigration too high" and Hebrew speakers could not swipe-type "occupied territories."
In an email, Apple did not comment directly on Kauffman's findings, including the size or composition of its list or its reasons for flagging certain political terms. It said iPhone users always had the option to type specific words or phrases and could always override any predictive text suggestions, and that its keyboard was set up to avoid offering suggestions that might be inappropriate or offensive.
Kauffman said he found the list in September after noticing that his swipe-typing would stutter over phrases such as "bad boy" or "white man" but not "bad girl" or "black man." He said he used OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code to hunt for a reason, eventually finding a compendium stored deep in Apple's operating system. He said a conservative estimate would put the list at about 100,000 words and phrases, not including Chinese characters.
Reuters tested a small subset of the phrases on an iPhone and found they were all difficult to enter through swipe-typing or were not suggested via autocomplete. Attempts to swipe-type "United Ireland" or "Tibetan independence" often yielded "United Iceland" or "Tibetan independences," while "Sleepy Joe" would yield "Sleepy hope." "Dictator Trump" could be swipe-typed, but "trump" was lowercase and the phrase was not suggested in autocomplete.
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, getting a near-perfect match. David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said part of him found the word list "creepy" but he could see an argument for it curbing 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."