OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased 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 a single report can be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose the number of both the reports and the total pieces of content they were about for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company made investments toward the end of 2024 “to increase [its] capacity to review and action reports in order to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said that the time frame corresponds to “the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which 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 it did the year before.