Federal Court Rules First Amendment Protects Private Possession of Synthetic CSAM Not Depicting Real Child

On September 2, 2026, Judge John Z. Lee of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that the First Amendment protects a person's right to privately possess child sexual abuse material created using artificial intelligence, provided the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home. The decision concerned Steven Anderegg, arrested in May 2024 and federally charged with using an AI image generator to create thousands of explicit images of minors and with sending some of those images to a 15-year-old boy. Judge Lee expressed concern that evolving technology complicates the lines drawn in laws and rulings on this topic.

The ruling underscores a structural challenge: when synthetic material not depicting an identifiable child is protected as private speech, enforcement relies on detecting the moment such material leaves the home and enters a conversation with a minor, which is where sextortion, grooming and distribution begin. Guardii's anti-CSAM and anti-sextortion detection closes that gap, identifying when AI-generated or deepfake material is being shared with a child in a direct-message conversation and flagging the coercion, escalation or targeting that typically accompanies it. Operating in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, the system surfaces the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than its contents, enabling rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency and blocking hostile contact before it reaches the child. Where constitutional constraints limit what can be criminalised in isolation, detection at the point of contact addresses the harm that matters: the child receiving the image and the offender using it to coerce, manipulate or extort.