OpenAI despatched 80 occasions as many baby exploitation incident experiences to the Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters through the first half of 2025 because it did throughout an identical time interval in 2024, in accordance with a current replace from the corporate. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally approved clearinghouse for reporting baby sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and different types of baby exploitation.
Firms are required by regulation to report obvious baby exploitation to the CyberTipline. When an organization sends a report, NCMEC critiques it after which forwards it to the suitable regulation enforcement company for investigation.
Statistics associated to NCMEC experiences may be nuanced. Elevated experiences can generally point out adjustments in a platform’s automated moderation, or the standards it makes use of to resolve whether or not a report is critical, somewhat than essentially indicating a rise in nefarious exercise.
Moreover, the identical piece of content material may be the topic of a number of experiences, 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 experiences and the whole items of content material they had been about for a extra full image.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila mentioned in an announcement that the corporate made investments towards the tip of 2024 “to extend [its] capability to evaluate and motion experiences as a way to preserve tempo with present and future consumer development.” Raila additionally mentioned 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 experiences.” In August, Nick Turley, vp and head of ChatGPT, introduced that the app had 4 occasions the quantity of weekly energetic customers than it did the yr earlier than.
Throughout the first half of 2025, the variety of CyberTipline experiences OpenAI despatched was roughly the identical as the quantity of content material OpenAI despatched the experiences about—75,027 in comparison with 74,559. Within the first half of 2024, it despatched 947 CyberTipline experiences about 3,252 items of content material. Each the variety of experiences and items of content material the experiences noticed a marked enhance between the 2 time intervals.
Content material, on this context, might imply a number of issues. OpenAI has mentioned that it experiences all situations of CSAM, together with uploads and requests, to NCMEC. In addition to its ChatGPT app, which permits customers to add recordsdata—together with pictures—and might generate textual content and pictures in response, OpenAI additionally provides entry to its fashions by way of API entry. The newest NCMEC depend wouldn’t embody any experiences associated to video-generation app Sora, as its September launch was after the timeframe lined by the replace.
The spike in experiences follows an identical sample to what NCMEC has noticed on the CyberTipline extra broadly with the rise of generative AI. The middle’s evaluation of all CyberTipline information discovered that experiences involving generative AI noticed a 1,325 p.c enhance between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not but launched 2025 information, and whereas different giant AI labs like Google publish statistics concerning the NCMEC experiences they’ve made, they don’t specify what share of these experiences are AI-related.
