A 32-year-old Anchorage man, Anthaney O'Connor, was sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty on 31 July 2025 to receipt of child sexual abuse material and possession of AI-generated obscene visual depictions of child sexual abuse. O'Connor received CSAM depicting prepubescent children from an active-duty Airman, distributed CSAM to other individuals, and planned to view the material using a virtual reality system; in stored messages he explained that he could use images of real children and manipulate them into sexually explicit content for use in virtual simulations. The FBI and United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations investigated the case, which was prosecuted under the Justice Department's Project Safe Childhood initiative targeting the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Guardii's anti-CSAM detection module, monitoring children's direct messages in real time across platforms including Discord, Instagram and Snapchat, intercepts both traditional photographic CSAM and the AI-generated visual depictions O'Connor created and distributed, blocking the material before it reaches the recipient and flagging the offender's network for law-enforcement investigation. The platform surfaces patterns of distribution rather than reading every message, protecting the privacy of compliant users while exposing organised predator networks like the one linking O'Connor to the active-duty Airman. As a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner, Guardii enables rapid escalation to the FBI, NCMEC's CyberTipline or Air Force OSI investigators when CSAM—synthetic or photographic—is detected, shortening the window between offence and arrest and reducing the volume of abuse imagery in circulation.
