A newly introduced federal bill wants to know whether the U.S. State Department is actually equipped to fight traffickers who are now using artificial intelligence to find and groom children online. The Countering Online Trafficking Act, introduced in Washington, D.C. by James Gallagher, would force a hard look at whether the government's anti-trafficking office has the technical chops to keep up with a threat that didn't exist in its current form a few years ago.
According to Action News Now, the bill would require the State Department to evaluate whether its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has the specialized expertise needed to identify and respond to evolving threats. Specifically, the office's ambassador-at-large would have to assess whether existing personnel have the technical background to address AI-facilitated trafficking. If that assessment turns up gaps, the ambassador-at-large would then be required to develop a plan to close them, per the same report.
Gallagher, who has served as California Assembly Republican leader, framed the legislation around a simple concern: criminals are moving faster than the institutions meant to stop them. He said human traffickers use new technology to prey on children and that the federal government must keep pace, the outlet reported. He added that human trafficking is a horrific crime demanding action, and that the responsibility to protect the innocent remains constant even as the technology around it changes.
How AI Is Already Showing Up in Trafficking Cases
The concern isn't hypothetical. Criminal organizations are exploiting artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies specifically to target vulnerable people, particularly children, according to the reporting. The U.S. Department of State has warned that AI can automate and expand the grooming of potential victims, letting traffickers reach far more targets at once than would be possible with human recruiters alone.
That warning lines up with language attributed to the department's 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, which states that AI systems can be used to automate and scale grooming through chatbots that optimize manipulation tactics using natural language processing and sentiment analysis, according to the U.S. Department of State. In other words, the same technology that powers customer-service bots and language apps can, in the wrong hands, be tuned to manipulate a child into trusting a stranger.
Global Numbers Show a Sharp Rise in Detected Victims
The scale of the broader trafficking problem has already been climbing, independent of AI. The number of trafficking victims detected globally rose 25% in 2022 compared with pre-pandemic 2019 figures, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Children bore a disproportionate share of that increase, with detected child victims up 31% over the same period, and girls alone accounting for a 38% rise among those child victims.
By 2022, children made up 38% of all detected trafficking victims worldwide, the UN agency reported. The same report found that victims trafficked for forced labor surged 47% between 2019 and 2022, while trafficking for forced criminality — including online scams — jumped from just 1% of detected victims in 2016 to 8% by 2022. Women and girls continued to make up the majority of detected victims globally, at 61% in 2022. The findings are drawn from the 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, which covered 156 countries across every region of the world.
A Repeat Player on Trafficking Legislation
This isn't Gallagher's first swing at tightening trafficking law. He previously helped secure passage of California's SB 14, which made qualifying child sex-trafficking offenses serious felonies under the state's three-strikes law. California's legislative records list the measure as Serious felonies: human trafficking, according to California Legislative Information.
Federal lawmakers have moved on related ground before, though not identical territory. In 2024, the U.S. House passed Representative John James' Global Anti-Human Trafficking Enhancement Act by voice vote with unanimous approval, according to the Office of Representative John James. Years earlier, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee produced a report on the Countering Human Trafficking Act of 2021, according to Congress.gov. Those earlier efforts focused on different mechanisms, but they reflect a recurring pattern of Congress revisiting anti-trafficking tools as new threats emerge.
For now, the Countering Online Trafficking Act is framed as a diagnostic step rather than a sweeping overhaul — it asks the State Department to check its own readiness before mandating specific fixes. Whether that assessment turns up serious gaps, and what any resulting plan would look like, remains to be seen.
