OpenAI despatched 80 occasions as many youngster exploitation incident stories to the Nationwide Middle for Lacking & Exploited Kids throughout the first half of 2025 because it did throughout an identical time interval in 2024, based on a recent update from the corporate. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally licensed clearinghouse for reporting youngster sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and different types of youngster exploitation.
Firms are required by legislation to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When an organization sends a report, NCMEC evaluations it after which forwards it to the suitable legislation enforcement company for investigation.
Statistics associated to NCMEC stories may be nuanced. Elevated stories can generally point out modifications in a platform’s automated moderation, or the standards it makes use of to resolve 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 stories, 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 stories and the whole items of content material they had been about for a extra full image.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila stated in a press release that the corporate made investments towards the top of 2024 “to extend [its] capability to overview and motion stories with a purpose to hold tempo with present and future person development.” Raila additionally stated that the time-frame corresponds to “the introduction of extra product surfaces that allowed picture uploads and the rising recognition of our merchandise, which contributed to the rise in stories.” In August, Nick Turley, vp and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had 4 occasions the quantity of weekly lively customers than it did the yr earlier than.
In the course of the first half of 2025, the variety of CyberTipline stories OpenAI despatched was roughly the identical as the quantity of content material OpenAI despatched the stories about—75,027 in comparison with 74,559. Within the first half of 2024, it despatched 947 CyberTipline stories about 3,252 items of content material. Each the variety of stories and items of content material the stories noticed a marked improve between the 2 time intervals.
Content material, on this context, may imply a number of issues. OpenAI has stated that it reports all cases of CSAM, together with uploads and requests, to NCMEC. In addition to its ChatGPT app, which permits customers to add information—together with photographs—and might generate textual content and pictures in response, OpenAI additionally presents entry to its fashions by way of API entry. The newest NCMEC depend wouldn’t embrace any stories associated to video-generation app Sora, as its September launch was after the time-frame lined by the replace.
The spike in stories 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 information discovered that stories involving generative AI noticed a 1,325 % improve between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not but launched 2025 information, and whereas different giant AI labs like Google publish statistics in regards to the NCMEC stories they’ve made, they don’t specify what proportion of these stories are AI-related.
