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
The Supreme Court is facing some of the biggest legal and political questions of the Trump era. Emily Bazelon joins Ian Bremmer to break down the rulings that could reshape executive power, voting rights, and public trust in America's highest court.
Most Popular
Think you know what's going on around the world? Here's your chance to prove it.
Smoke billows from southern Lebanon, following Israeli strikes, as seen from Nabatieh, Lebanon, June 4, 2026.
REUTERS/Stringer
Lebanon and Israel signed a ceasefire, but Hezbollah didn't, and that is a problem. With Netanyahu under pressure to escalate, Trump searching for a face-saving exit, and Iran unmoved by US muscle-flexing, the deadlock shows no signs of breaking.
US President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter prior to signing an executive order on AI next to Sriram Krishnan, Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and David Sacks, chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., USA, on December 11, 2025.
REUTERS/Al Drago
Artificial intelligence and Donald Trump's foreign policy are creating huge tail risks for markets.
© 2025 GZERO Media. All Rights Reserved | A Eurasia Group media company.