Missouri attorney general issues guidance on protecting children from online exploitation

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued formal guidance on November 12, 2026, outlining legal remedies available to parents when explicit or manipulated images of their children appear online. Under Chapter 573 of the Missouri Revised Statutes, sharing, threatening to share, or possessing sexually explicit depictions of minors constitutes a felony offense, and the statute expressly includes artificial intelligence and computer-generated deepfake imagery within its scope. Hanaway directed parents to preserve evidence immediately, notify law enforcement, and take steps to halt distribution, while reiterating the state's support for federal Kids Online Safety Act legislation to establish baseline platform safety requirements.

Detection at the moment of first contact, not at the moment of discovery by a parent, is the standard Guardii sets for AI deepfake child sexual abuse material and image-based sexual abuse. Guardii's anti-CSAM detection module identifies AI-generated and manipulated imagery targeting a child in direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms, blocking the hostile material before it reaches the target and alerting the parent, school or authority in real time. By surfacing the shape and seriousness of a threat without handing anyone a feed of what was said, the platform enables rapid escalation to law enforcement with actionable intelligence, closing the gap between the creation of a deepfake and the family's awareness that abuse has occurred.