OpenAI despatched 80 instances as many youngster exploitation incident studies to the Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters throughout the first half of 2025 because it did throughout an identical time interval in 2024, in keeping with a recent update from the corporate. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally approved clearinghouse for reporting youngster sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and different types of youngster exploitation.
Firms are required by legislation to report obvious youngster exploitation to the CyberTipline. When an organization sends a report, NCMEC opinions it after which forwards it to the suitable legislation enforcement company for investigation.
Statistics associated to NCMEC studies may be nuanced. Elevated studies can generally point out modifications in a platform’s automated moderation, or the standards it makes use of to determine whether or not a report is critical, moderately than essentially indicating a rise in nefarious exercise.
Moreover, the identical piece of content material may be the topic of a number of studies, and a single report may be about a number of items of content material. Some platforms, together with OpenAI, disclose the variety of each the studies and the full items of content material they have been about for a extra full image.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila stated in an announcement that the corporate made investments towards the tip of 2024 “to extend [its] capability to evaluate and motion studies with the intention to preserve tempo with present and future person progress.” Raila additionally stated that the timeframe corresponds to “the introduction of extra product surfaces that allowed picture uploads and the rising reputation of our merchandise, which contributed to the rise in studies.” In August, Nick Turley, vp and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had 4 instances the quantity of weekly energetic customers than it did the 12 months earlier than.
In the course of the first half of 2025, the variety of CyberTipline studies OpenAI despatched was roughly the identical as the quantity of content material OpenAI despatched the studies about—75,027 in comparison with 74,559. Within the first half of 2024, it despatched 947 CyberTipline studies about 3,252 items of content material. Each the variety of studies and items of content material the studies noticed a marked enhance between the 2 time intervals.
Content material, on this context, might imply a number of issues. OpenAI has stated that it reports all situations of CSAM, together with uploads and requests, to NCMEC. Apart from its ChatGPT app, which permits customers to add information—together with photographs—and may generate textual content and pictures in response, OpenAI additionally gives entry to its fashions by way of API entry. The newest NCMEC rely wouldn’t embrace any studies associated to video-generation app Sora, as its September launch was after the timeframe coated by the replace.
The spike in studies follows an identical sample to what NCMEC has noticed on the CyberTipline extra broadly with the rise of generative AI. The middle’s analysis of all CyberTipline knowledge discovered that studies involving generative AI noticed a 1,325 p.c enhance between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not but launched 2025 knowledge, and whereas different giant AI labs like Google publish statistics concerning the NCMEC studies they’ve made, they don’t specify what proportion of these studies are AI-related.
