AI-Generated CSAM After Anderegg: What Law Enforcement Must Do

Following the Seventh Circuit ruling in United States v. Anderegg dismissing a possession count for AI-generated CSAM depicting no real child as unconstitutional under current federal law, approximately 47 state legislatures have passed laws criminalizing AI-generated or computer-edited child sexual abuse material, with Arkansas, Texas, Alabama and Pennsylvania adopting standards such as virtually indistinguishable or appears to authentically depict a child, while Massachusetts, Ohio, Vermont and Washington D.C. have not yet enacted such legislation. The Senate passed the ENFORCE Act in December 2025 to increase criminal penalties for AI-generated or modified CSAM and remove certain statutes of limitations, though the legislation awaits House review, leaving law enforcement navigating a patchwork of state definitions and federal gaps.

The proliferation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, including wholly synthetic and deepfake imagery, introduces a detection challenge distinct from traditional CSAM enforcement: material is created, customized and distributed at scale without an initial victim to report or a known image to hash-match. Real-time detection of AI-generated CSAM solicitation, creation or distribution in direct-message exchanges addresses this by identifying the behavioral signals that precede material generation, the request for a child's image to manipulate, the attempt to share or normalize synthetic abuse content, or the use of generated material to coerce a child into producing authentic imagery. Anti-CSAM detection, backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner, flags these sequences as they occur across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, intercepting the harm whether the material depicts an identifiable child or is synthetically generated, and surfacing the contact to the relevant authority under the applicable state or federal standard.