OpenAI Reports 80x Increase in Child Exploitation Incident Reports to NCMEC
The artificial intelligence company saw a dramatic surge in reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025, highlighting growing concerns about the potential for misuse of generative AI.
OpenAI sent approximately 80 times more incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) during the first six months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to a recent company update. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline serves as a critical, Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation, with a legal mandate requiring companies to report suspected instances.
The increase in reporting doesn’t necessarily equate to a proportional rise in exploitation, experts caution. Statistics surrounding NCMEC reports are often complex, and can be influenced by changes in a platform’s automated moderation systems or the criteria used to determine when a report is necessary. It’s also important to note that a single piece of content can generate multiple reports, and a single report can encompass multiple instances of concerning material. OpenAI, along with other platforms, now discloses both the number of reports submitted and the total amount of content referenced in those reports to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the situation.
According to the data, OpenAI submitted 75,027 CyberTipline reports relating to 74,559 pieces of content during the first half of 2025. This represents a significant jump from the 947 reports concerning 3,252 pieces of content submitted during the first half of 2024. Both the number of reports and the volume of content flagged saw a marked increase between the two periods.
A company spokesperson, Gaby Raila, stated that OpenAI invested in increased capacity for reviewing and addressing reports toward the end of 2024 “to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also explained that the surge in reports coincides with “the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploads and the growing popularity of our products.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the application’s weekly active user base had quadrupled year-over-year.
The nature of the “content” triggering these reports is broad. OpenAI reports all instances of CSAM, including both user uploads and generated requests, to the NCMEC. Beyond the popular ChatGPT app—which allows for file uploads, including images, and generates both text and images—OpenAI also provides access to its models through an API interface. Notably, the latest NCMEC count does not include any reports related to Sora, OpenAI’s video-generation application, as its September release occurred after the reporting period.
This spike in reports mirrors a broader trend observed by the NCMEC with the increasing prevalence of generative AI. The center’s analysis of all CyberTipline data revealed a staggering 1,325 percent increase in reports involving generative AI between 2023 and 2024. While the NCMEC has not yet released 2025 data, other major AI labs, such as Google, publish statistics regarding their NCMEC reports, but do not delineate the percentage specifically related to AI-generated content.
