A Call to Action to Combat Image-Based Sexual Abuse

By Arati Prabhakar, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy & Jennifer Klein, Director of the Gender Policy Council

Since day one of the Biden-Harris Administration, President Biden and Vice President Harris have been committed to addressing gender-based violence in all forms. Image-based sexual abuse—including synthetic content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and real images distributed without consent—has skyrocketed in recent years, disproportionately targeting women, girls, and LGBTQI+ people. For survivors, this abuse can be devastating, upending their lives, disrupting their education and careers, and leading to depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and increased risk of suicide.

In his Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI, President Biden makes clear that the United States must manage the risks of AI in order to seize its benefits. Image-based sexual abuse has emerged as one of the fastest growing harmful uses of AI to-date. To end this abuse, it will take collaboration across the public and private sectors. That’s why the White House is calling on technology companies and civil society to tackle this pervasive problem. We encourage companies and other organizations to provide meaningful tools that will prevent and mitigate harms, and to limit websites and mobile apps whose primary business is to create, facilitate, monetize, or disseminate image-based sexual abuse. We are also calling on Congress to strengthen legal protections and provide critical resources for survivors and victims of image-based sexual abuse, including AI-generated images, building on the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization in 2022.

These calls build on actions by the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, the President’s AI executive order, and voluntary commitments made by leading AI companies to manage the risks of AI. They also flow from the Vice President’s remarks in London before the AI Safety Summit, which underscored that deepfake image-based sexual abuse is an urgent threat that demands global action.

The time to act is now.

Industry leaders—including payment processors, mobile app stores and developers, cloud providers, search engines, and others—can help prevent and remedy the harms of image-based sexual abuse. In collaboration with civil society leaders, advocates, and survivors, the Biden-Harris Administration is calling on stakeholders, including the private sector, to tackle image-based sexual abuse by making voluntary commitments such as:

• Disrupting the monetization of image-based sexual abuse. Payment platforms and financial institutions could curb access to payment services for sites or mobile apps whose primary business is dedicated to image-based sexual abuse—particularly sites that advertise explicit images of minors.
• Stopping the creation of deepfake image-based sexual abuse. Cloud service providers and mobile app stores could curb web services and mobile applications that are marketed for the purpose of creating or altering sexual images without individuals’ consent, and mobile app stores could commit to instituting requirements for app developers to prevent the creation of non-consensual images. 

• Preventing the distribution of image-based sexual abuse. Mobile app and mobile operating system developers could enable technical protections to better protect content stored on digital devices and to prevent image sharing without consent.

• Supporting and participating in services that provide meaningful remedies to survivors. Platforms and other industry players could opt in to working with resources that can enable adult and youth survivors of image-based sexual abuse to easily and securely remove non-consensual content from participating online platforms.

Voluntary commitments such as these will help prevent harms associated with image-based sexual abuse, and stakeholders may also consider a range of additional commitments to end image-based sexual abuse. Companies and stakeholders may contact the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Gender Policy Council at IBSACalltoAction@ostp.eop.gov

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