After renewed pressure from the US government, the operators of the piracy website HiAnime have shut down the platform. This means that one of the largest illegal contact points for anime is no longer accessible. We summarize.
Anime piracy in focus
The shutdown does not come as a surprise: In the “Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy in 2025” report from the US Trade Representative (USTR), HiAnime is again listed in the “online markets” section. The platform is accused of illegally providing “films and television shows, especially anime.”
This is the second year in a row that the website has appeared in the report, which specifically names services that commit or promote copyright infringement.
Particularly explosive: According to USTR, HiAnime is the direct successor to Aniwatch. The former piracy website was listed in 2023 and was renamed HiAnime in 2024 – probably to avoid increasing pressure.
HiAnime now seems to be history. After the website had no longer been accessible in the past few days, the operators confirmed the final shutdown of the platform a short time later.
Major damage
According to current estimates, online piracy will cause damage to the Japanese video market of around 2.3 trillion yen (around 12.6 billion euros) in 2025, which is why countermeasures have been strengthened accordingly.
HiAnime was seen as one of the main factors for this development, as the platform’s monthly user numbers were often higher than those of legal streaming services such as Crunchyroll or Disney+.
The website peaked at around 331.6 million visits in November 2024, but after that the number of visits continued to decline. According to the USTR report, around 244 million hits were registered in August 2025, while SimilarWeb only reports around 180 million for January 2026.
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Via TorrentFreak
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