Congress Must Address AI-Generated Sexual Depictions of Childre

We, the undersigned, call upon the United States Congress to take immediate action to address the creation, possession, solicitation, and distribution of AI-generated sexual depictions representing children.

Artificial intelligence has changed the world.

Our laws must change with it.

On August 25, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued its decision in United States v. Anderegg, a case involving hyper-realistic, AI-generated sexual images depicting prepubescent children.

The court did not create this problem.

Instead, it was required to confront modern generative artificial intelligence using constitutional precedent developed long before today's AI technology existed, including the Supreme Court's 2002 decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.

That distinction is important.

In 2002, the Supreme Court struck down portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act that broadly prohibited sexually explicit depictions that appeared to involve minors but were created without using an actual child.

At the time, today's generative artificial intelligence did not exist.

Twenty-four years later, technology has fundamentally changed what can be created.

A person can now use generative AI to produce photorealistic images depicting children who do not exist and make those images increasingly difficult to distinguish from photographs of actual children.

We believe Congress must respond to that technological reality.

Protecting the First Amendment does not require Congress to ignore new technology.
We recognize that any legislation regulating expressive material must comply with the United States Constitution.

That is precisely why we are asking Congress, not individual citizens, parents, photographers, schools, or technology companies to undertake the difficult work of crafting legislation that addresses this problem while surviving constitutional scrutiny.

This petition does not ask Congress to censor legitimate art, medical material, education, scientific research, journalism, or lawful expression.

It asks Congress to confront a very specific problem:

The intentional use of artificial intelligence to create sexual depictions representing children for sexual purposes.

Children should not become responsible for preventing the misuse of technology.
In the aftermath of developments involving generative AI, parents are understandably frightened about photographs of their children appearing online.

Those concerns deserve respect.

Parents should have meaningful control over the public use of identifiable photographs of their children.

But removing children from school websites, yearbooks, athletic photographs, dance recitals, newspapers, community events, family social-media accounts, family photography portfolios, and other ordinary parts of childhood cannot eliminate this problem.

Children should not have to disappear from our visual history because adults have found horrifying ways to misuse technology.

Nor should responsibility for preventing that misuse fall primarily upon parents, teachers, coaches, schools, or other innocent people sharing ordinary photographs.

The responsibility must be placed on those who intentionally use technology for exploitation and on lawmakers and technology companies capable of addressing that misuse.

We cannot undo the past.
Millions upon millions of photographs of children have already appeared publicly over decades.

They exist in yearbooks, newspapers, sports coverage, school websites, photography portfolios, social-media accounts, family blogs, television coverage, public events, and countless other places.

A parent may choose today to remove photographs they previously posted.

A school may change its policies tomorrow.

But none of those actions can guarantee that a photograph publicly available yesterday was never downloaded, copied, screenshotted, scraped, archived, or otherwise obtained.

We therefore reject the idea that the solution to abusive AI is simply making innocent photographs disappear.

The focus should be on stopping abusive conduct, not erasing childhood.

We ask Congress to act.
We Call Upon Congress To:
1. Immediately investigate the impact of modern generative artificial intelligence on existing federal laws concerning sexual depictions of minors and determine where technological advances have created gaps in existing protections.
2. Hold congressional hearings involving constitutional scholars, child-safety experts, prosecutors, technology researchers, survivors' advocates, AI developers, parents, photographers, and digital-rights experts.
3. Develop narrowly tailored, constitutionally sound legislation addressing the knowing and intentional creation, solicitation, possession, and distribution of AI-generated sexual depictions representing minors.
4. Create particularly strong protections for real children when an identifiable child's photograph, likeness, image, or identity is used, altered, manipulated, or incorporated into sexual material through artificial intelligence or other digital technology.
5. Establish meaningful criminal and civil consequences for individuals who knowingly use artificial intelligence to sexually exploit or target an identifiable real child, as well as individuals who knowingly create, possess, solicit, or distribute AI-generated sexual imagery depicting or representing minors, regardless of whether the depicted child corresponds to an identifiable real person.
6. Require appropriate safeguards and reporting mechanisms from companies providing generative-AI systems capable of producing photorealistic human imagery, consistent with constitutional protections and applicable privacy laws.
7. Provide clear and narrowly defined exceptions protecting legitimate medical, scientific, educational, legal, journalistic, and other constitutionally protected uses.
8. Require continuing congressional review as artificial-intelligence technology evolves so that laws designed to protect children evolve alongside the technology rather than remaining decades behind it.

This is not a partisan issue.

Children are not Democrats.

Children are not Republicans.

Protecting them from sexual exploitation should not depend upon political affiliation.

Neither should protecting constitutional rights.

Congress is capable of taking both responsibilities seriously.

The answer to technological abuse cannot simply be telling parents to hide their children, schools to erase their students, or families to pretend that decades of photographs never existed.

We should regulate the abusive conduct, not innocent childhood.

The technology changed.

The capability changed.

The scale changed.

Now the law must confront what those changes mean.

We respectfully call upon the United States Congress to act.