The Urgent Need for a Global Treaty on Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property, and Cybercrime: Addressing Personal Attribute Protection, Platform Accountability, and the Escalating Crisis of AI-Generated Illegal Content

ABSTRACT

1. Introduction

Generative AI systems capable of producing hyper-realistic synthetic media have moved from research laboratories into ubiquitous consumer tools. While these systems deliver substantial benefits across medicine, education, and creative industries, they have simultaneously lowered the technical and financial barriers to the production of illegal and harmful content on an industrial scale. Of greatest concern is the generation of child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate imagery that exploits the biometric attributes of real individuals without consent. National and regional responses have accelerated in 2025 and 2026, yet the underlying problems have intensified rather than abated.

This paper contends that the current patchwork of domestic legislation, voluntary platform commitments, and soft-law intergovernmental initiatives is structurally inadequate. Three interlocking deficits are particularly acute: (i) the lack of an effective, trusted, and genuinely anonymous mechanism through which individuals and researchers can report platform failures and malicious content; (ii) declining public and expert confidence in the capacity of national governments, acting alone or through existing mutual legal assistance channels, to investigate and disrupt cross-border AI-enabled abuse; and (iii) the absence of binding, interoperable standards that treat personal attributes as protectable intellectual property and that impose proactive design obligations on model developers and hosting platforms. These deficits can be remedied only through a purpose-built global treaty that assigns clear roles to intergovernmental organizations and creates enforceable obligations for states and private actors.

The analysis proceeds as follows. Section 2 documents the deterioration of the threat landscape over the past year. Section 3 examines the persistent legal and institutional gaps, with particular attention to reporting mechanisms and governmental capacity. Section 4 reviews recent intergovernmental and plurilateral developments. Section 5 sets out the core elements of a proposed treaty and the institutional architecture required for its implementation. Section 6 addresses objections regarding sovereignty and innovation. Section 7 concludes with prioritized recommendations for policymakers and international organizations.

2.        The Worsening Landscape of AI-Generated Illegal Content (2025–2026)

Empirical indicators confirm that the problem has intensified. The Internet Watch Foundation and partner organizations reported that actionable AI-generated child sexual abuse material more than doubled between 2024 and 2025 in certain jurisdictions, with subsequent assessments describing exponential growth across both dark-web and mainstream platforms. Independent analysts estimate that the biometric likenesses of at least 1.2 million children have already been incorporated into synthetic CSAM. Law-enforcement operations — Operation Cumberland (2025) and Operation Torch (July 2026) — have demonstrated the transnational character of distribution networks, yet the volume of new material continues to outpace the volume of removals.

Simultaneously, commercial ecosystems that monetize non-consensual AI-generated intimate imagery have proliferated. Platforms offering “AI influencer” generation, nudification tools, and instructional courses on scraping and synthesizing real people’s images have attracted tens of thousands of subscribers. Although the U.S. TAKE IT DOWN Act (in force May 2026) now requires covered platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery—authentic or synthetic—within 48 hours of notification, and although the European Union has prohibited AI systems that generate or manipulate sexual deepfakes and CSAM under revised AI Act provisions, enforcement remains reactive and uneven. Sophisticated actors continue to bypass content filters, host infrastructure in permissive jurisdictions, and exploit encrypted channels and anonymous payment systems.

The practical consequence is that innocuous or tangential web searches (some often performed by children, e.g., on “toons”) can still surface illegal synthetic material. Victims—whether public figures or private individuals, including minors—have limited recourse once content has been generated and redistributed. The technological capacity to produce such material has advanced faster than the institutional capacity to detect, report, and suppress it.

3.       Persistent Gaps: Reporting Mechanisms and Trust in Governmental Capacity

3.1 Absence of Effective and Trusted Anonymous Reporting Channels

Existing reporting pathways are fragmented, platform-centric, and frequently non-anonymous. Most generative-AI providers rely on in-product “report” buttons or email addresses that require user accounts, generate logs that can be subpoenaed, or route complaints through commercial trust-and-safety teams whose incentives are imperfectly aligned with public-interest enforcement. National hotlines and cyber-tip lines (for example, NCMEC in the United States) have expanded their intake of AI-generated CSAM, yet they remain primarily reactive, depend on voluntary cooperation from platforms, and offer limited protection for researchers or whistleblowers who fear retaliation or secondary liability.

No globally recognized, independently governed, cryptographically protected anonymous reporting channel exists that can securely transmit evidence of model vulnerabilities, filter bypasses, or systematic platform non-compliance to both national authorities and intergovernmental coordination bodies. The resulting information asymmetry advantages malicious actors and platforms that under-invest in safeguards.

3.2 Eroding Trust in National Governments’ Capacity to Combat Cross-Border Abuse

Public and expert confidence in national governments’ ability to police AI-enabled cybercrime has declined. Mutual legal assistance treaties and traditional extradition processes are slow relative to the speed of content generation and redistribution. Jurisdictional arbitrage remains straightforward: model weights, inference endpoints, and distribution infrastructure can be relocated or mirrored across borders within hours. Even well-resourced agencies confront capacity constraints—technical, legal, and human—when confronted with encrypted traffic, anonymizing networks, and the sheer volume of synthetic material.

Survey evidence and civil-society reporting indicate that victims and advocates increasingly perceive domestic enforcement as symbolic rather than effective, particularly when perpetrators or hosting services are located outside cooperative jurisdictions. This perception undermines willingness to report, and fuels demand for private, extralegal remedies that themselves raise rule-of-law concerns. A treaty-based architecture that pools investigative resources, standardizes evidence formats, and creates standing intergovernmental task forces is therefore essential to restore credibility.

4.       The Contemporary Intergovernmental Landscape

Several parallel processes have emerged. The United Nations General Assembly established the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence in 2025 and launched the Global Dialogue on AI Governance; the Panel’s preliminary report (July 2026) underscored the scale of AI-enabled human-rights harms, including synthetic CSAM. The Council of Europe has advanced criminalization of AI-generated CSAM under its cybercrime and child-protection instruments. The European Union has tightened prohibitions and transparency deadlines under the AI Act. In July 2026, twenty-nine states signed the constitutive agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), headquartered in Shanghai and framed by China as a development-oriented alternative to existing Western-led forums.

These initiatives demonstrate political recognition of the problem yet remain largely non-binding, geographically partial, or focused on high-level principles rather than operational enforcement. WAICO’s membership excludes the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, raising the prospect of competing governance clubs. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, while valuable, was not designed for generative-AI offenses and does not address personal-attribute intellectual-property questions. WIPO’s ongoing conversations on AI and intellectual property have yet to produce treaty-level norms on biometric likeness. The result is institutional fragmentation precisely when coherence is most needed.

5.      Proposed Elements of a Global Treaty

A binding multilateral instrument on AI, intellectual property, and cybercrime should contain at least the following operative components:

Standardized definitions. Personal attributes (face, voice, gait, and other biometric identifiers) shall be recognized as protectable intellectual-property interests subject to consent-based licensing. AI-generated CSAM and non-consensual intimate imagery, whether of real or purely synthetic minors, shall be classified as serious cybercrime offenses.

Platform design and audit obligations. States shall require developers and deployers of generative models that exceed defined capability thresholds to implement state-of-the-art safeguards against the generation of prohibited content, maintain auditable logs, apply robust watermarking or provenance techniques, and undergo independent conformity assessments at regular intervals.

Interoperable anonymous reporting mechanism. The treaty shall establish, under the auspices of an intergovernmental body (potentially a joint secretariat of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, INTERPOL, and a designated AI governance entity), a cryptographically protected, multi-channel reporting system that accepts anonymous submissions from individuals, researchers, and civil-society organizations and routes validated intelligence to competent national and international authorities.

International enforcement cooperation. Parties shall create or designate a standing coordination mechanism—modeled on successful INTERPOL operational networks—to facilitate real-time information sharing, joint investigations, and specialized mutual legal assistance for AI-generated content and platform non-compliance.

Consent and privacy baseline. Explicit, informed, and revocable consent shall be required for any commercial or large-scale use of an individual’s personal attributes in generative systems. Data-protection standards no lower than those of the GDPR shall apply to biometric training data.

Capacity building and technology transfer. Recognizing the development dimension emphasized by WAICO and Global South states, the treaty shall include obligations and funding mechanisms for technical assistance, deployment of detection tools, and training of law enforcement and judicial personnel in lower-capacity jurisdictions.

Institutionally, the treaty should designate clear roles: the UN system (including the Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue) for norm development and scientific assessment; the Council of Europe and regional organizations for criminal-law approximation; INTERPOL and regional police organizations for operational coordination; WIPO for intellectual-property standard-setting; and a lean treaty secretariat for monitoring, reporting, and facilitation of the anonymous tip channel. Existing soft-law instruments (UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, Global Digital Compact) can supply guiding principles but cannot substitute for binding obligations and verification.

6.        Sovereignty, Innovation, and Enforcement Feasibility

Critics will argue that a global treaty risks constraining national regulatory autonomy or slowing beneficial innovation. The proposed design accommodates legitimate differentiation: states retain discretion over implementation modalities, enforcement intensity, and additional protections, provided core prohibitions and platform obligations are met. Experience with the EU AI Act demonstrates that clear rules can coexist with, and even stimulate, investment by increasing legal certainty and public trust. Enforcement feasibility is admittedly challenging, yet precedents in cybercrime (Budapest Convention), chemical weapons, and financial integrity demonstrate that specialized intergovernmental mechanisms, combined with domestic implementing legislation and private-sector due diligence duties, can produce measurable results. The alternative—continued fragmentation and reactive national responses—has already proven insufficient against the observed growth in AI-generated CSAM and non-consensual imagery.

7.       Conclusion and Recommendations

The technological capacity to generate illegal synthetic content has outstripped the institutional capacity of states and existing intergovernmental organizations to prevent, detect, and punish it. Legislative advances in 2025–2026 are welcome but remain geographically limited, largely reactive, and unsupported by a trusted anonymous reporting infrastructure or a robust cross-border enforcement architecture. Public confidence in governmental efficacy continues to erode.

The following prioritized actions are recommended:

• States and relevant intergovernmental organizations should open formal negotiations on a binding treaty covering personal-attribute intellectual property, AI-generated CSAM, and non-consensual intimate imagery, platform design obligations, and an independent anonymous reporting mechanism.
• Pending treaty conclusion, the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the Independent Scientific Panel should prioritize operational recommendations on reporting channels and platform audit standards, while INTERPOL and regional partners expand specialized task forces.
• Major AI developers and hosting platforms should be required, through coordinated national regulation, to implement and publicly document proactive safeguards, with independent verification.
• WAICO, the G7 Hiroshima Process, the Council of Europe, and other forums should establish structured liaison arrangements to minimize contradictory standards and to maximize information sharing on enforcement best practices.
• Donor states and multilateral development banks should finance capacity-building programs that equip lower-resource jurisdictions with detection tools, forensic training, and secure reporting infrastructure.

The costs of continued inaction—measured in irreversible harm to children and adults whose biometric identities are appropriated, in the normalization of synthetic abuse, and in the further erosion of trust in both technology and governance—far exceed the diplomatic and administrative costs of negotiating and implementing a coherent global regime. Intergovernmental organizations possess the convening power and normative legitimacy to lead; what is required now is political will translated into binding legal form.

8.        Conflict of Interest

The authors state that there is no conflict of interest.

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