OpenAI despatched 80 instances as many little one exploitation incident reviews to the Nationwide Middle for Lacking & Exploited Kids through the first half of 2025 because it did throughout the same time interval in 2024, in accordance with a latest replace from the corporate. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally licensed clearinghouse for reporting little one sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and different types of little one exploitation.
Corporations are required by regulation to report obvious little one exploitation to the CyberTipline. When an organization sends a report, NCMEC opinions it after which forwards it to the suitable regulation enforcement company for investigation.
Statistics associated to NCMEC reviews might be nuanced. Elevated reviews can generally point out adjustments in a platform’s automated moderation, or the factors it makes use of to resolve whether or not a report is important, somewhat than essentially indicating a rise in nefarious exercise.
Moreover, the identical piece of content material might be the topic of a number of reviews, and a single report might be about a number of items of content material. Some platforms, together with OpenAI, disclose the variety of each the reviews and the whole 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 assessment and motion reviews with a view to preserve tempo with present and future consumer progress.” Raila additionally stated that the time-frame 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 reviews.” In August, Nick Turley, vice chairman and head of ChatGPT, introduced that the app had 4 instances the quantity of weekly energetic customers than it did the yr earlier than.
Throughout the first half of 2025, the variety of CyberTipline reviews OpenAI despatched was roughly the identical as the quantity of content material OpenAI despatched the reviews about—75,027 in comparison with 74,559. Within the first half of 2024, it despatched 947 CyberTipline reviews about 3,252 items of content material. Each the variety of reviews and items of content material the reviews noticed a marked enhance between the 2 time intervals.
Content material, on this context, may imply a number of issues. OpenAI has stated that it reviews all cases of CSAM, together with uploads and requests, to NCMEC. Moreover its ChatGPT app, which permits customers to add information—together with pictures—and may generate textual content and pictures in response, OpenAI additionally provides entry to its fashions by way of API entry. The latest NCMEC rely wouldn’t embrace any reviews associated to video-generation app Sora, as its September launch was after the time-frame coated by the replace.
The spike in reviews follows the same 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 reviews involving generative AI noticed a 1,325 % enhance between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not but launched 2025 information, and whereas different massive AI labs like Google publish statistics in regards to the NCMEC reviews they’ve made, they don’t specify what share of these reviews are AI-related.
