OpenAI despatched 80 occasions as many baby exploitation incident stories to the Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Kids in the course of 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 approved clearinghouse for reporting baby sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and different types of baby exploitation.
Corporations are required by legislation to report obvious baby exploitation to the CyberTipline. When an organization sends a report, NCMEC critiques it after which forwards it to the suitable legislation enforcement company for investigation.
Statistics associated to NCMEC stories will be nuanced. Elevated stories can typically point out modifications in a platform’s automated moderation, or the standards it makes use of to determine whether or not a report is important, relatively than essentially indicating a rise in nefarious exercise.
Moreover, the identical piece of content material will be the topic of a number of stories, and a single report will be about a number of items of content material. Some platforms, together with OpenAI, disclose the variety of each the stories and the overall items of content material they have been about for a extra full image.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila stated in a press release that the corporate made investments towards the tip of 2024 “to extend [its] capability to evaluation and motion stories in an effort to maintain tempo with present and future person development.” Raila additionally stated that the timeframe 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, vice chairman 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 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 enhance between the 2 time durations.
Content material, on this context, may imply a number of issues. OpenAI has stated that it stories all situations of CSAM, together with uploads and requests, to NCMEC. Apart from its ChatGPT app, which permits customers to add recordsdata—together with pictures—and may generate textual content and pictures in response, OpenAI additionally affords entry to its fashions by way of API entry. The newest NCMEC rely wouldn’t embrace any stories associated to video-generation app Sora, as its September launch was after the timeframe coated by the replace.
The spike in stories 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 knowledge discovered that stories involving generative AI noticed a 1,325 p.c enhance between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not but launched 2025 knowledge, and whereas different massive AI labs like Google publish statistics in regards to the NCMEC stories they’ve made, they don’t specify what share of these stories are AI-related.
