Why AI ‘Model Cards’ Are an Urgent Necessity for Child Safety

Last November, when the Canadian Center for Child Protection published nationally-representative data on the scale of sextortion and other forms of image based online abuse, it was a wake-up call for child safety online. According to the survey of nearly 1,300 Canadian teens who were sexually victimized online, over half of the cases involved images and 23% involved threats to post, send, or show others real or AI images. Despite child safety protections by major tech platforms that promise to detect and intervene on intimate imagery of minors, 39% reported these experiences on Snapchat, 20% on Instagram, and 20% on Facebook.

Sextortion detection, particularly in settings involving minors, is increasingly urgent—in the United States, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received nearly 100 reports of financial sextortion per day in 2024, with further surges in 2025. And while child safety algorithms have become an important talking point for technology makers eager to assure concerned parents, the open secret of child safety is that no one can say how well those algorithms work. This supply chain of ignorance represents a devastating risk to children’s lives each day they log on. It’s also an unexploded landmine for designers trying to create safer products, for technologists working to provide safety services to those designers, and for investors financing safer tech.