Massachusetts investigators say they are drowning in a fast-rising tide of online child sexual abuse material, as new artificial intelligence tools and encrypted platforms inflate the number of files landing on their desks. State troopers and prosecutors report such a heavy backlog that basic triage and forensic work now drag on far longer than they did even a few years ago.
At a secure State Police facility in Milford, bags of phones, hard drives, and memory cards from child exploitation cases are piling up, a physical reminder of what some officials are bluntly calling a “tidal wave” of material that the system built to stop it simply cannot catch. That grim assessment comes from investigators speaking to reporters, according to The Boston Globe.
The local crunch fits into a global pattern. A new Global Threat Assessment from the WeProtect Global Alliance finds a sharp spike in reports involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material, including roughly a 1,325% jump in tips to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children between 2023 and 2024, and notes that NCMEC received about 20.5 million reports of suspected exploitation in 2024. Those shifts, the group says, are pushing existing detection and prevention systems to the brink, according to WeProtect Global Alliance.
Independent hotlines are spotting the same explosive growth and new technical threats. The Internet Watch Foundation’s 2026 AI CSAM report logged 8,029 AI-generated images and videos in 2025, including 3,443 full-motion AI videos, an increase the charity labels both dramatic and deeply troubling, per The Internet Watch Foundation.
That flood of reports is already weighing heavily on federal and local caseloads. Recent enforcement figures show the FBI opened more than 6,100 child exploitation cases in fiscal year 2024 and identified roughly 2,600 victims, while Homeland Security Investigations reported thousands of related probes and rescues. Those numbers help explain why Massachusetts troopers say their cybercrime units are stretched past capacity, according to The Boston Globe.
Why AI and encryption make cases harder
Generative AI now churns out photorealistic images and videos that can be nearly impossible to distinguish from depictions of real abuse, while end-to-end encryption shunts conversations and file transfers into spaces that platforms cannot easily scan. Taken together, those trends mean that tips from the public and painstaking human review are still central to spotting children in immediate danger, even as the volume of material soars.
That work is getting harder faster than agencies can staff up or retool their systems. As WeProtect notes, prevention frameworks and coordinated efforts across government, tech companies, and child-protection groups have become essential just to keep pace with the evolving threat.
Legal patchwork leaves gaps
On paper, some new tools are in place. At the federal level, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, requires covered platforms to pull down non-consensual intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes, on a tight timeline, according to Senate Commerce. In Massachusetts, lawmakers passed “An Act to Prevent Abuse and Exploitation” in 2024, expanding penalties for revenge porn and addressing digitized images, as detailed by the Mass. Legislature (H.4744).
Advocates argue that even with those updates, state law still lacks clear, explicit language that squarely covers AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The combination of federal and state efforts may be progress, but policy experts say more precise legal tools are needed to match the way this material is now created and spread.
What investigators and advocates want
Law enforcement leaders and child-protection groups are coalescing around three big asks. First, they want sustained funding to build out and retain digital forensics teams, rather than scrambling from grant cycle to grant cycle. Second, they are pushing for mandatory safety-by-design standards for AI developers and major platforms, so that basic protections are engineered into products instead of bolted on later.
Finally, they are pressing for state laws that clearly criminalize the creation or distribution of AI-generated sexual imagery of children. Advocacy organizations that draft model statutes and support state campaigns say those changes would give prosecutors cleaner tools to charge offenders and would help platforms shift from reactive takedowns to building prevention into their systems from the start, according to EnoughAbuse.
