OpenAI’s Child Exploitation Reports Increased Sharply This Year
OpenAI sent 80 times as many incidents of child exploitation reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the first half of 2025 as in a similar period in 2024, according to a recent update of the company. The NCMEC's CyberTipline is a congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are legally required to report seemingly born exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends in a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased reports can sometimes indicate changes in a platform's automated moderation, or the criteria it uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in malicious activity.
In addition, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and one report can be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose the number of both the reports and the total pieces of content they were about for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company made investments towards the end of 2024 “to increase [its] ability to view reports and action reports to keep pace with current and future user growth. Raila also said the time frame coincided with “the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which contributed to the increase in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and principal of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times the number of active users per week than the year before.
In the first half of 2025, the number of CyberTipline reports that OpenAI sent was about the same as the amount of content that OpenAI sent the reports – 75,027 compared to 74,559. In the first half of 2024, it sent 947 CyberTipline reports on 3,252 pieces of content. Both the number of reports and pieces of content the reports saw a marked increase between the two time periods.
Content can mean several things in this context. OpenAI has said so reports all cases from CSAM, including uploads and requests, to NCMEC. In addition to its ChatGPT app, which allows users to upload files – including images – and generate text and images in response, OpenAI also offers access to its models via API access. The most recent NCMEC count would not include reports related to video generation app Sorabecause the September release was after the time frame covered by the update.
The spike in reports follows a similar pattern to what NCMEC has observed at the CyberTipline more broadly with the rise of generative AI. The center analysis of all CyberTipline data found that reports involving generative AI saw a 1,325 percent increase between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has yet to release 2025 data, and while other major AI labs such as Google publish statistics on the NCMEC reports they have produced, they do not specify what percentage of those reports are AI-related.
