Federal appeals court rules private possession of AI-generated CSAM depicting no real child may be protected by First Amendment

On August 25, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in United States v. Anderegg that the First Amendment protects private possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse material when it depicts no real person and remains in the home. The ruling came in a case against Steven Anderegg of Wisconsin, who was charged in 2024 with using an AI image generator to create thousands of explicit images of children and distributing them; while the court upheld dismissal of the possession charge, it left production and distribution charges intact. Judge John Z. Lee noted that existing Supreme Court precedents dating to 2002 forced the decision, writing that the court had concerns about the lines drawn by cases decided before modern generative AI but was not free to redraw them, and urged the Supreme Court to reconsider the issue given that the technology available today was likely unimaginable when those precedents were set.

Blanket prohibitions on possession that rest on decades-old precedent create statutory gaps that detection at the point of contact can close. Anti-CSAM detection, deployed where images are created or transmitted rather than where they are stored, identifies abuse material in transit regardless of whether it depicts a real child, flagging both synthetic and photographic exploitation before it reaches its intended recipient or a platform where it can spread. That operational shift addresses the harm the Seventh Circuit ruling exposes without requiring every user to surrender possession rights or waiting for the Supreme Court to reconsider constitutional boundaries written before generative AI existed, focusing enforcement resources on the moment abuse material moves rather than on what sits in private storage.