OpenAI posted 80 as many times as many cases of child exploitation are reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the first half of 2025 as occurred during the same period in 2024, according to the latest update from the company. NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressional clearinghouse for reporting material on child sexual abuse (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report suspected child abuse to CyberTipline. When a company submits a report, NCMEC reviews it and forwards it to a law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports may vary. Additional reports may sometimes reflect changes in the platform’s automated controls, or the criteria it uses to determine whether a report is required, rather than an increase in negative activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and a single report can be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose both the number of reports and the total number of pieces of content that were about the overall image.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company invested in late 2024 “to grow. [its] update capabilities and action reports to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said the timing coincided with “the introduction of more product sites that allow photo uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which has contributed to the increase in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times the number of weekly active users than last year.
During the first half of 2025, the number of CyberTipline reports sent by OpenAI was almost the same as the number of content OpenAI sent reports about—75,027 compared to 74,559. In the first half of 2024, it posted 947 CyberTipline reports about 3,252 pieces of content. Both the number of reports and the content pieces of the reports saw a marked increase between the two periods.
Content, in this context, can mean many things. OpenAI said it reports all CSAM instances, including uploads and requests, to NCMEC. Besides its ChatGPT program, which allows users to upload files—including images—and can 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 the video production app Sora, as its release in September was after the time frame covered by the update.
The spike in reports follows a similar pattern to what NCMEC has seen in CyberTipline more broadly with the rise of manufacturing AI. The agency’s analysis of all CyberTipline data found that reports involving manufacturing AI saw a 1,325 percent increase between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not yet released data for 2025, and although some major AI labs such as Google publish statistics about the NCMEC reports they have made, they do not specify what percentage of those reports.
