Sponsors (3)
The bill strengthens protections against child sexual abuse material by encouraging dataset screening and reporting and giving companies a conditional legal safe harbor, but it expands obligations and automated reporting in ways that raise compliance costs, privacy risks, coverage gaps, and potential reductions in accountability.
Children and youth face reduced exposure to child sexual abuse material because developers and dataset collectors will have guidance and incentives to detect and remove such material from training datasets.
Law enforcement and victim-protection channels (NCMEC) will likely receive more timely reports of illegal material because the framework encourages regular reporting by companies.
Companies and AI developers that follow the Director's framework gain clearer legal protection (a safe harbor), lowering legal and reputational risk and making them more likely to detect, remove, and report illicit material quickly.
Tech workers and small businesses face new or expanded regulatory obligations and higher compliance costs because broad definitions (including wide 'covered dataset' scope and scraping) may bring common data practices under the rule.
Individuals and lawful users risk wrongful takedowns, misidentification, and privacy harms because increased automated detection and reporting (plus limited safeguards) can lead to mistaken removals and disclosures.
Because the framework is voluntary and narrowly focused (excluding many deployers and users), adoption may be uneven and gaps could remain where models or services still disseminate illicit material despite cleaned datasets.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Introduced July 22, 2025 by John Cornyn · Last progress July 22, 2025
Creates a federal process for reducing child sexual abuse material in AI training data by directing the Director (of NIST) to publish a voluntary framework within one year that helps AI developers and data collectors detect, remove, and report child pornography found in datasets gathered by automated scraping. It also directs NSF to support related research. The bill offers a limited-liability safe harbor for developers and data collectors who act in accordance with the framework, except where there is intentional misconduct, gross negligence, certain criminal violations, or actual malice.