OpenAI 80 cents According to a study published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the number of reports of child abuse incidents in the first half of 2025 was many times higher than in the same period in 2024. last update from the company. NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child abuse.
Companies are required by law to report incidents of apparent child abuse via the CyberTipline. When a company submits a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be refined. An increased number of reports can sometimes indicate changes to the platform’s automatic moderation or the criteria the platform uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an boost in nefarious activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and a single report can cover multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose the number of reports and the total content covered to provide a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokeswoman Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company had made investments in overdue 2024 “to increase [its] the ability to view reports and take actions to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said the time frame corresponds to “the introduction of more product surfaces that have enabled photo uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which has contributed to the boost in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times as many weekly dynamic users as the year before.
In the first half of 2025, the number of CyberTipline reports submitted by OpenAI was roughly the same as the amount of content OpenAI submitted in reports – 75,027 compared to 74,559. In the first half of 2024, it submitted 947 CyberTipline reports covering 3,252 pieces of content. Both the number of reports and their content increased significantly in both periods.
Content in this context can mean many things. OpenAI said so reports all CSAM instances, including file uploads and requests, to NCMEC. In addition to the ChatGPT app, which allows users to upload files – including images – and can generate text and images in response, OpenAI also offers access to its models via API access. The latest NCMEC data does not include any reports related to the Sora video generating app, as its September launch fell within the update period.
The surge in reports follows a similar pattern to what NCMEC observed more broadly during CyberTipline with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Center analysis across CyberTipline data, Generative AI reports saw a 1,325% boost from 2023 to 2024. NCMEC has not yet released data for 2025, and although other major AI labs such as Google publish statistics on the NCMEC reports they prepare, they do not specify what percentage of these reports concern artificial intelligence.