Published September 2nd, 2026 - 06:58 GMT
ALBAWABA - An unsettling court ruling by a federal judge sparked outrage in the US after protecting an individual's right to privately possess child porn and sexual abuse images if they are AI-generated. The federal judge argued that the First Amendment can protect certain material. According to Snopes, Judge John Z. Lee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit cited two U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1969 and 2002 that ruled that people have the right to keep obscenity in the privacy of their homes and that sexual abuse material that does not depict real children is protected by the First Amendment.Judge Lee wrote, "Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models, we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves."A federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images or videos of child sexual abuse created using AI — if the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home.The court relied on Supreme Court… pic.twitter.com/FJ12HIf04r— Pop Base (@PopBase) August 28, 2026 According to The Washington Post, in 2024, the Justice Department charged a man from Wisconsin called Steven Anderegg with using a popular AI generator to produce thousands of explicit images of children.When Anderegg sought to have charges against him dismissed under the First Amendment, a judge in the Western District of Wisconsin agreed last year, prompting an appeal from the federal prosecutors.Anderegg was also accused of sending explicit AI images he produced to a 15-year-old boy on Instagram.In response, angry netizens flooded social media in protest of the ruling: "Disgusting. The U.S. is treating AI-generated child sexual abuse material as constitutionally protected speech, while simultaneously escalating efforts to restrict speech, protest, boycotts, and political expression when it comes to opposing Israel and Zionism.""AI that generates child porn was trained on child porn and should therefore be illegal to possess.""The pedo behind this case is Steven Anderegg, who didn’t just generate hundreds of photorealistic images of children being sexually abused, he also sent them to a young boy. And the worst part about this ruling is, you can’t even really solely fault the judges here. There are literally no laws for this in the US. There are no regulations. American CSAM law is completely behind on media and AI, and this guy knew that and used it to his advantage."
