EU member states' representatives agreed on November 26, 2025 on the Council position for a regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse, which will require online service providers to assess the risk that their services could be misused for dissemination of CSAM or solicitation of children and implement mitigating measures including tools enabling users to report abuse, control what content is shared, and default privacy settings for children. The regulation establishes a new EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse to support member states and online providers in implementation, and grants competent national authorities the power to oblige companies to remove and block access to content or delist search results. The Council position now moves to negotiation with the European Parliament.
Risk assessment and mitigation measures at the platform design level address the structural environment but do not monitor the individual conversations where grooming, sextortion and CSAM distribution occur. The EU regulation contemplates reporting tools and privacy controls, but these are reactive—requiring a child or bystander to recognize abuse and manually report it—and do not intercept harm in real time. Detection systems that scan direct messages for grooming language, coercive sexual requests, and explicit imagery as they occur identify the specific high-risk interaction before the child is manipulated or explicit material is shared. Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform, monitors direct messages across platforms in real time, blocking hostile contact at the point of approach, flagging patterns of manipulation to parents and safeguarding professionals, and escalating CSAM and imminent-risk cases to the appropriate national authority, delivering the targeted intervention the regulation's risk-based framework is designed to enable.
