MIAMI — President Donald Trump’s administration recently warned about human traffickers’ increased use of artificial intelligence to expand criminal networks’ online scams and target minors.

The U.S. State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report warned that the use of automated systems is helping criminals to expand and target victims “at an unprecedented scale.”

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is proliferating quickly. The researchers reported finding more than 20,000 of those images in a single dark web forum alone.

The researchers reported these “can serve as a gateway to child sex trafficking, as predators use grooming tactics to build relationships,” which could include “portraying themselves as children to build trust with potential child victims online.”

The agency warned that there are vulnerable children who are victims of commercial sex trafficking, slavery-like practices, and armed groups that “forcibly” recruit them to serve as combatants and informants.

Human traffickers use fake job offers to target victims and later force them through violence and the withholding of food and water to operate internet scams, according to the report.

“These scams netted criminals an estimated $25-$64 billion globally in 2023. Large scam operations have proliferated in Southeast Asia and increasingly in other regions around the world,” a researcher wrote, adding that these fraudsters made at least about $10 billion out of U.S. citizens last year.

Researchers reported “state-sponsored human trafficking” in Cuba’s medical services missions, which generated $4.9 billion in revenue for the Communist government in 2022.

The Chinese Communist Party’s forced labor exploits “Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” according to the report.

Aside from Cuba and China, the department also accused Russia, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Sudan of “state-sponsored trafficking in persons.”

At sea, “distant water and coastal fishing fleets exploit migrant seafarers ... through deception; wage withholding; debt-based coercion; and physical, psychological, sexual, and other abuses facilitated by some influential seafood companies, recruitment agencies, and complicit officials,” according to the report.

The department’s report encouraged “leveraging AI for anti-trafficking efforts” to be used as “a powerful prevention and intervention tool” by “detecting and flagging” social media content, and “by analyzing online commercial sex advertisements, extracting phrases and language patterns, processing diverse digital evidence, and enabling law enforcement agencies to make data-driven decisions.”

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