There Is a Hidden Word List Inside the iPhone Keyboard

A security researcher has found a hidden multilingual word list inside the iPhone keyboard, and the way he found it is as interesting as the list itself.

Derik Kauffman noticed in September that swipe typing behaved oddly on certain phrases. “Bad boy” and “White man” would stutter; “Bad girl” and “Black man” went through cleanly. The asymmetry suggested a filter, so he turned two coding agents — OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code — on the system files, and they found the list. He calls it the Gray List.

Its effect is narrow but real. The keyboard will not suggest those entries through autocomplete or swipe, though it does not stop anyone typing them by hand. Kauffman estimates roughly 100,000 words, phrases and variants — a figure he describes as conservative, depending on how you count.

Most of the list is what you would expect: profanity, sexual content, drugs, violence. Some of it is political. Reuters, testing the finding independently, confirmed that swiping “United Ireland” can produce “United Iceland”, that “Sleepy Joe” can come out as “Sleepy hope”, and that “Dictator Trump” completes but is never recommended, with “Trump” quietly lowercased. Other languages carry their own entries, including Hindi phrases aimed at Indian political figures.

Apple's response did not dispute the finding. The company said users can always type what they want and override predictions, and that the keyboard is designed not to suggest content that may be inappropriate or offensive. It did not address the list's size, its contents, or why political expressions are on it.

Another researcher, Matt Suiche of the security firm Tolmo, said he recovered the same list independently and that it matches Kauffman's closely — and that it has been in Apple's software for years.

The dispute is about transparency rather than intent. Kauffman calls it a mild form of censorship with inconsistent execution, and notes that at the scale of hundreds of millions of phones, even a light touch reaches a great many people. David Greene, senior legal counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said limiting inappropriate predictions has some justification, but that users should know the mechanism exists and be able to adjust it. Hiding the list entirely, he argued, is the wrong default.