U.S. Appeals Court Rules AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material Protected by First Amendment

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit struck down a provision of federal law, effectively declaring that entirely computer-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is protected by the First Amendment. The court's decision acknowledged the difficulty of applying decades-old Supreme Court precedent to hyper-realistic AI-generated images and signaled that the Supreme Court might need to reconsider the precedent. The ruling did not address 'morphed' CSAM created using images of real children.