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
It’s been just over 48 hours since US forces conducted a military operation in Caracas and seized Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, and the future governance of the country – and the US role in it – remains murky.
Most Popular
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy listens to US President Donald Trump, after Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed willingness to help Ukraine "succeed," during a press conference at the Mar-a-Lago club, in Palm Beach, Florida, USA, on December 28, 2025.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The Guinea-flagged oil tanker MT Bandra, which is under sanctions, is partially seen alongside another vessel at El Palito terminal, near Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, on December 29, 2025.
REUTERS/Juan Carlos Hernandez
There have been several geopolitical shocks this year, yet none have stopped oil prices from plunging, showing how oil markets have become more risk tolerant.
© 2025 GZERO Media. All Rights Reserved | A Eurasia Group media company.