Disgusting.

https://balleralert.com/appeals-court-ai-generated-child-abuse-images-first-amendment-ruling/

The legal reasoning runs through two Supreme Court decisions, both of which predate generative AI by decades. The first is Stanley v. Georgia in 1969, which held that a person has a constitutional right to possess obscene material in the privacy of their own home, even when the state can ban selling or distributing it. The second is Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition in 2002, which held that virtual child sexual abuse material, meaning depictions that do not involve any real child, is not child pornography under the law and cannot be banned on the same basis. Actual child sexual abuse material remains illegal to possess anywhere under Osborne v. Ohio.

What the appeal covered is the part getting lost as this circulates. The Seventh Circuit ruled only on the home possession charge. The charges against Anderegg for producing and distributing the material are still pending. So is the separate charge for allegedly sending similar AI-generated sexual images to a 15-year-old boy over Instagram.

The court did not rule that making this material is legal, did not rule that sharing it is legal, and did not dismiss the case against him.

They have decided just the possession part is legal under current case law/precedent, however they have not yet decided on the legal merits of the creation or distribution that material.

The scope is narrower than the headline suggests. Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at Stanford, pointed out that the ruling does not protect downloading images from a third-party website, and does not protect carrying a phone or laptop containing the images outside the house. That distinction has already been tested. In a January 2026 case, U.S. v. Yener, a court followed the Anderegg reasoning but reached a different result because the defendant’s phone containing the material was found on him at a diner and in a storage unit rather than at his residence.