Sponsors (3)
The bill strengthens federal tools, sentencing, and program support to deter and punish online threats, sextortion, and coercion targeting minors — improving protections and prosecutorial clarity — but increases federal criminal exposure, raises civil‑liberties and due‑process risks, and will add enforcement, correctional, and administrative costs.
Children and survivors: makes threats to distribute child sexual images (including bluff threats) and related sextortion across state/online lines prosecutable, giving prosecutors clearer federal tools to deter and punish coercion and exploitation.
Children and communities: updates sentencing guidelines and clarifies statutory definitions so punishments better reflect technology-enabled harms, victim counts, production/distribution, and severe harms (including suicide), improving alignment of sentences with victim impact.
Minors and prosecutors: creates a federal coercion offense for using mail/interstate/online channels to coerce minors to self-harm, injure, kill, or commit arson and expressly expands program definitions under the PROTECT Our Children Act, enabling prosecutions and program support.
Broad/ambiguous criminal definitions and new offenses: children, parents, and the public may face overbroad prosecutions or chilled speech because terms like 'threat', 'coerce', and expanded 'child abuse/online' language risk sweeping in ambiguous online conduct or bluffing.
Sentencing and fairness risks: defendants (including those with unproven or uncharged allegations) could receive substantially longer sentences because expanded guideline factors permit consideration of conduct not proven at trial, raising due-process and fairness concerns.
Greater federal criminal exposure for youth and others: people (including juveniles) face increased federal prosecution risk and much harsher penalties—including life terms for certain coercion offenses—shifting more youth cases into the federal system.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Creates new crimes for threatening to distribute CSAM and coercing minors to harm, raises penalties for sextortion, and directs sentencing-guideline changes for child-exploitation offenses.
Makes new federal crimes and raises penalties to combat online threats, coercion, and exploitation of minors. It criminalizes threats to distribute child sexual abuse material (even if no image exists), creates a new offense for coercing children to kill, harm, or commit arson, and directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to revise guidelines to increase penalties for a range of child-exploitation offenses. The bill also adds conforming edits across federal criminal statutes to incorporate the new offenses and broaden certain definitions to cover online coercion and child abuse more broadly.
Official title: COP Act
Introduced December 15, 2025 by Laurel Lee · Last progress February 26, 2026