New York proposes criminal penalties for deepfake child sexual abuse material

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced proposed legislation to establish criminal liability for the creation and distribution of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, explicitly classifying deepfake imagery of minors as illegal under state law. The bill, introduced in November 2024, would allow prosecutors to charge offenders who use generative AI tools to produce sexually explicit depictions of children, closing a gap in existing statute that did not expressly address synthetic or algorithmically created content. The proposal includes provisions enabling victims depicted in deepfake CSAM to pursue civil remedies, and follows a national pattern of states updating child-protection law to account for emerging AI-based threats.

Legislative clarity on the criminal status of AI-generated CSAM strengthens the hand of prosecutors once an offender is identified, but the detection burden remains: synthetic material is produced and circulated in private channels, often on platforms where traditional content moderation has limited reach. The world-leading AI safety technology Guardii deploys addresses precisely this operational gap, with a dedicated module trained to recognise the conversational and transactional patterns associated with deepfake CSAM creation and distribution. Operating across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other messaging services, Guardii's real-time monitoring surfaces solicitation of source photos, commission negotiations and image sharing as it occurs, enabling parents, educators and safeguarding teams to escalate a live threat to law enforcement before material proliferates, and providing the evidentiary thread that underpins successful prosecution under statutes such as New York's proposed measure.