AI-CSAM Ruling: What the Seventh Circuit’s Anderegg Decision Means for Child Safety

Generative artificial intelligence can now produce virtual sexual depictions of children (AI-generated child sexual abuse material, or “AI-CSAM”) that are nearly indistinguishable from images documenting the abuse of actual children. A recent federal appellate court decision has brought into sharp focus the tension between that technology and a legal framework developed long before such imagery was possible. The headlines were alarming, but the AI-CSAM ruling is considerably narrower than they suggest—and it does not make AI-CSAM broadly legal.

In the recent AI-CSAM ruling, United States v. Anderegg, federal prosecutors charged a Wisconsin man with producing, distributing, possessing, and transferring sexually explicit AI-generated depictions of children. According to the government, Anderegg used Stable Diffusion, a generative-AI program, to create more than 13,000 realistic sexual images of prepubescent children. Read more –>