Week 10: Tennessee Passes Landmark Law Criminalizing AI-Generated Child Exploitation Material
In June 2025, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed Senate Bill 741 into law, making it one of the first U.S. states to criminalize the use of artificial intelligence to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The legislation, which takes effect on July 1, 2025, explicitly bans the possession, distribution, and production of AI tools created to generate such material. Under the law, possession of AI-generated CSAM is classified as a Class E felony, distribution as a Class C felony, and production as a Class B felony. The measure was designed to close a legal loophole that previously made it difficult to prosecute AI-generated child abuse imagery that did not involve real children but posed comparable threats to public safety and victim dignity. The bill was introduced amid growing concern over how generative AI models could be misused to produce hyperrealistic yet synthetic sexual images of minors. Lawmakers in Tennessee have argued that while such images may not depict actual c...