Anti-piracy coalition takes down AnimePlay app with 5 million users

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced the shutdown of AnimePlay, a major anime streaming platform with over 5 million users.

Backed by more than 50 major television networks and film studios, including Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Netflix, and Universal Pictures, ACE focuses on taking down illegal streaming services through civil litigation, criminal referrals, and cease-and-desist operations.

In recent years, ACE targeted and dismantled a long string of other large-scale illegal streaming networks in joint operations with law enforcement. Most recently, in November 2025, it shut down Photocall, a massive TV piracy streaming platform with over 26 million users annually.

In its latest action, the anti-piracy coalition shut down the AnimePlay anime streaming platform, which hosted more than 60 terabytes of anime TV shows and movies and had amassed over 5 million registered users, most of them from Indonesia.

ACE took control of the AnimePlay app and dismantled the operation by taking all infrastructure offline, including hosting servers and web domains.

"ACE secured control of not just the application, but also its underlying infrastructure, including 15 associated domains, source code, hosting environment, and related digital assets, all of which have now been taken offline," the anti-piracy organization said in a Thursday statement. "In so doing, ACE has effectively dismantled the operation and restricted the operator's ability to rebuild or relaunch the service."

The developer and admin of the piracy service also surrendered control of the backend ecosystem powering AnimePlay to ACE, including backend servers, associated databases, advertising tools, and 29 GitHub repositories containing full source code.

"We will continue working with our partners across the Asia Pacific region and globally to dismantle criminal operations like this and safeguard the integrity of the creative economy," added Larissa Knapp, Chief Content Protection Officer and Executive Vice President for the Motion Picture Association (MPA).