The law requires companies to report explicit child exploitation to a cyber tipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
The data related to the NCMEC report can be granular. Increased reports may sometimes indicate a change in a platform’s automated moderation, or the criteria used to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in nefarious activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content may be the subject of multiple reports, and the same report may be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose both the number of reports and the total pieces of content they report for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Rella said in a statement that the company has made the investment “to scale up” to the end of 2024. [its] Ability to review and take action on reports to keep pace with current and future user growth. Raila also said that the time frame “coincided with the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploading and the increasing popularity of our products, which contributed to the increase in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPIT, announced that the app had quadrupled the number of weekly active users compared to the previous year.
During the first half of 2025, the number of Cyber Tipline reports sent by OpenAI was almost the same as the number of reports OpenAI sent – 75,027 compared to 74,559. In the first half of 2024, it sent 947 cyber tipline reports about 3,252 pieces of content. There was a significant increase in the number of reports and the fragments of report content between both time periods.
Content in this context can mean many things. OpenAI has stated that it reports all instances of 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 provides access to its models through API access. The most recent NCMEC count will not include any reports related to video-generation app Sora, as its September release was after the time frame covered by the update.
The surge in reports follows the same pattern NCMEC has seen on cyber tiplines more broadly with the rise of generative AI. The center’s analysis of all Cyber Tipline data found that reports related to generative AI saw a 1,325 percent increase between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not yet released the 2025 data, and while other large AI labs like Google publish statistics about NCMEC reports, they do not specify what percentage of those reports are AI-related.
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