OpenAI sent 80 According to a recent update from the company, times as many child exploitation cases will be reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the first half of 2025 as in a comparable period in 2024. NCMEC's CyberTipline is a congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are legally obliged to report (apparent) child exploitation to the Cyber Tip Line. When a company submits a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics regarding NCMEC reports can be nuanced. More 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 nefarious activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and one report can cover multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, make public the number of reports and total content for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company has made investments by the end of 2024 “to [its] ability to review reports and take action to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said the time frame reflects “the introduction of more product surfaces that enabled image uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which has contributed to the increase in the number of reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times as many weekly active users as the year before.
During the first half of 2025, the number of CyberTipline reports OpenAI sent was about the same as the amount of content 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 the content of the reports showed a clear increase between the two periods.
Content can mean several things in this context. OpenAI has said it reports all instances of CSAM, including uploads and requests, to NCMEC. In addition to the 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 the video generation app Sora, because its September release fell after the time frame covered by the update.
The spike in reports follows a similar pattern to what NCMEC has observed more broadly on the CyberTipline with the rise of generative AI. The center's analysis of all CyberTipline data found that reports on generative AI saw a 1,325 percent increase between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not yet released data for 2025, and while other major AI labs like Google publish statistics on the NCMEC reports they have created, they do not specify what percentage of those reports are AI-related.
