Brazil Enacts Comprehensive Law Criminalizing AI-Generated Child Sexual Exploitation Material

On August 6, 2026, Brazil enacted Law No. 15,487 to modernize legal mechanisms combating sexual violence and exploitation of children and adolescents on digital platforms, explicitly addressing artificial intelligence. The legislation amended the Penal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure, the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, the Law of Heinous Crimes, and the Law to Combat Organized Crime. The law establishes penalties of three to five years imprisonment plus a fine for using AI or digital manipulation to simulate explicit sexual representations involving a minor, with the same penalties for individuals who sell, distribute, publish, acquire, possess, or store digitally generated material. The law also increased baseline penalties for producing or registering content depicting sexual violence against minors from four to eight years to four to 10 years imprisonment, classifying these offenses as heinous crimes.

Legislation that criminalizes possession and distribution establishes the legal foundation for prosecution but does not prevent the image from being created or the child from being coerced into providing source material in the first place. Detection at the point of contact addresses both. Guardii's anti-CSAM module, which includes detection of AI-generated and deepfake imagery, operates in the direct-message layer where an offender solicits, manipulates or threatens a child to obtain the photograph or video that will later be manipulated, scanning for grooming language, coercive requests for images, and escalation from conversation to exploitation. When a synthetic or manipulated image enters a conversation, the system flags it without requiring a human reviewer to view the content. The Brazilian law punishes the outcome; platform-layer detection supported by Guardii technology disrupts the predatory process that creates it.