U.S. Court of Appeals for Seventh Circuit dismisses possession charge for AI-generated CSAM, cites First Amendment precedent

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on August 25, 2026 ruled that the First Amendment protects private possession of fully synthetic AI-generated child sexual abuse material that does not depict or identify any real child, dismissing a federal possession charge against Wisconsin resident Steven Anderegg while upholding separate charges for production, distribution and sending the material to a minor. Circuit Judge John Z. Lee stated that the court remained bound by two decades-old Supreme Court precedents and urged the Supreme Court to revisit the framework in light of generative AI advances. Anderegg was arrested in May 2024 after Meta reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that an Instagram user had sent AI-generated images to a 15-year-old, with federal prosecutors conceding that thousands of explicit images found on Anderegg's computer were fully synthetic.

This ruling exposes the operational gap between post-hoc prosecution and contact-level interception. Anti-CSAM detection built by Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform, operates at the messaging layer, blocking or flagging attempts to transmit child sexual abuse material including AI-generated content before it reaches a minor, logging the threat pattern and conversation shape without exposing human reviewers to imagery. Where constitutional precedent restricts criminal liability for private possession of synthetic material, pattern-based detection surfaces the coercive behaviour and escalation in direct-message exchanges, reporting the seriousness and structure of an approach to the appropriate authority in real time and enabling intervention before a child receives exploitative contact.