No, the Supreme Court Didn't Legalize AI-Generated CSAM

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on August 25, 2026 in United States v. Anderegg, upholding dismissal of a single possession charge against a defendant accused of using Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 AI-generated sexual images of children, while production, distribution and transfer charges remained intact. The federal appeals court, citing 2002 Supreme Court precedent protecting fictional depictions where no actual child was exploited, voiced concern that image-generation technology available today was unimaginable 25 years ago and asked the Supreme Court to revisit the issue. The ruling applies only to private possession of wholly synthetic material where no identifiable child appears, not to deepfakes, production or distribution.

Courts now distinguish between wholly synthetic CSAM and sexual deepfakes that depict an identifiable child, but the conversation that produces source material for either is operationally identical: an adult contacts a minor, escalates to sexual topics, demands imagery, or manipulates the child into complying. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-CSAM detection, backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner, flags that escalation in real time across direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms, surfacing children at acute risk to parents, schools or law enforcement before images are created, possessed or enter the legal grey zone the Seventh Circuit identified, intercepting the harm upstream of the constitutional question.