May 28, 2024
This month, the US Department of Justice charged a 42-year-old Wisconsin man named Steven Anderegg with alleged crimes related to creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography. If convicted of all four counts brought by federal prosecutors, Anderegg faces up to 70 years in prison.
The case is novel. It’s the first time that the federal government has brought charges for child porn fully generated by AI. The government said that Anderegg created a trove of 13,000 fake images using the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, made by the company Stability AI, along with certain add-ons to the technology. This isn’t the first blow-up involving Stable Diffusion, though. In December, Stanford University researchers found that the dataset LAION-5B, used by Stable Diffusion, included 1,679 illegal images of child sexual abuse material.
This case could set a new precedent for an open question: Is AI-generated child pornography — for all intents and purposes under the law — child pornography?
More For You
Last week, Microsoft took legal and technical action to disrupt Fox Tempest, a cybercrime-as-a-service operation that enabled attackers to disguise malware as trusted software and scale ransomware attacks globally. The case highlights a growing shift toward service-based cybercrime ecosystems and the importance of targeting upstream tools that make attacks harder to detect. Read the full blog here.
Most Popular
Think you know what's going on around the world? Here's your chance to prove it.
- YouTube
Is Cuba next? Yesterday the Trump administration indicted Raúl Castro. Now the question—in Washington as much as Havana—is if Trump is preparing another regime change campaign in the Caribbean. But he'd do well to remember that Cuba is not Venezuela, says Eurasia Group's Latin America expert Risa Grais-Targow.
The surge first began when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition with far-right leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and accelerated after the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Gaza-based militant group Hamas.
© 2025 GZERO Media. All Rights Reserved | A Eurasia Group media company.