Romania Closes the AI Loophole: Parliament Rewrites Its Child-Exploitation Law

On September 16, Romania's Chamber of Deputies adopted a sweeping reform to how the country's criminal code treats the sexual exploitation of children — and one of its most important changes is a matter of language. The amendment to Article 374 of the Criminal Code replaces the term "child pornography" with "materials containing sexual abuse of minors." The point is deliberate: the old phrase describes a category of media, while the new one names a crime and puts the child's status as a victim at the center of it. The bill now goes to the President for promulgation and takes effect after publication in the Official Gazette.

The substance matches the signal. The reform spells out criminal liability across the full chain — production, promotion, procurement, possession, storage, distribution, and making the materials available — and raises the penalties at nearly every step. Production carries 5 to 12 years in prison; promotion or exposure, 3 to 10; and procurement, possession, storage, distribution, or making available, 2 to 7. Merely accessing the materials now carries 1 to 5 years, up from 1 to 3, and participating in performances rises to 2 to 7 years, up from 1 to 5. Confiscation measures, reporting obligations, and the reach of criminal liability are all strengthened as well. This is not a symbolic resolution. It is a sentencing table, rewritten upward across the board.

Two provisions address crimes that have outrun the old law. Grooming is now explicitly criminalized. And the reform covers materials generated or manipulated with the help of artificial intelligence — closing a loophole that exploiters have been testing in courtrooms across Europe, where defendants argue that no real child appears in the images. The new text does not care how the image was made; if it depicts the sexual abuse of a minor, it is criminal. That question reached deep into the legislative process: a Senate legal opinion from April dissected exactly how to handle AI-generated materials, materials with unidentifiable minors, and materials featuring adults posing as minors — recommending that conduct not involving a real, identifiable child be carved out into a distinct offense rather than folded into the main exploitation crime. The adopted reform answers the core of that debate in the way victim advocates wanted: the AI loophole is closed, full stop.

The language change is part of a much larger shift, and Romania didn't invent it — it joined it. Legal scholars have been arguing for years that "child pornography" is a misnomer that smuggles in the language of a legitimate industry; a 2026 analysis in the Romanian legal journal LESIJ traces how European standards, from Directive 2011/93/EU through the Council of Europe's Lanzarote Convention, have pushed toward the CSAM paradigm — child sexual abuse material — precisely because the terminology determines whether the law sees a media category or a victim. Romania's own parliament has been active in that European conversation: in its formal opinion on the EU's proposed regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse, the Chamber of Deputies backed limits on CSAM dissemination, supported accounting for AI-generated material, and pushed for clearer rules on identifying, removing, and blocking abusive websites in coordination with the Digital Services Act. This week's reform is the domestic counterpart to that European posture — Brussels-level principles written into the national criminal code.

The parliamentary committee behind the bill was careful about one more thing: the reform is aimed at exploiters, not children. The language avoids criminalizing private, consensual, non-exploitative situations between adolescents close in age — a distinction that specialists in justice, law enforcement, and victim protection were consulted on during drafting. That consultation matters more than it looks on paper. Laws written in a hurry about children and technology have a long history of catching the wrong people; the committee's insistence on expert input is what separates a serious reform from a headline. The U.S. State Department's human rights reporting on Romania has long noted the scale of the problem the law is trying to reach — from online exploitation to the trafficking networks that prey on vulnerable communities — and the gap between the old Article 374's maximums and the sentences the new table sets.

What happens next is procedural but not trivial. The law goes to the President of Romania for promulgation, then to the Official Gazette, and only then do the new provisions take effect. Between adoption and enforcement sits the real work: training investigators and prosecutors on the AI provisions, standing up the strengthened reporting obligations, and making sure the confiscation regime actually neutralizes the infrastructure — the programs and facilitating instruments, not just the files — through which the material is produced and circulated. The academic literature is blunt on this point: a confiscation regime that only seizes images while leaving the means of production intact is decoration. Romania's reform, on paper, aims at the means too. It is a careful piece of legislative work: tougher on the people who cause the harm, precise about who is the victim, and modern enough to cover the ways the harm is now made. For a country reshaping its justice system in public, this is what the unglamorous, necessary version of progress looks like.