New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday.

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

Fitzgerald was charged after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip that a Discord user shared an illicit image in July. Cops then used “digital forensics and subscriber records” linked to the Discord account and “associated Internet protocol addresses” to track the user to Fitzgerald’s home address.

After a search Thursday, cops “recovered prompts and scripts used to create artificially generated child sexual abuse material using an AI program,” the press release said. They also found Discord chat logs where Fitzgerald, under the Discord username “thegentlemanpervert_2160_07833,” allegedly “admitted to making multiple illicit images using artificial intelligence and sharing them with other users.”

Fitzgerald’s is a rare case where an official employed by the state’s top law enforcement and legal office has been accused of making and distributing AI CSAM, although some cops have been arrested for the crime. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania cop was arrested for making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses, and more recently in Korea, a police officer was arrested for making AI porn, including CSAM, The Korea Times reported.

In New Jersey, the deputy attorney general has been charged with possession of CSAM, dissemination of photos or film of CSAM, and “criminal use of a communication facility,” detectives said.

According to his LinkedIn, Fitzgerald had served as deputy attorney general since 2016, preparing insurance fraud and insurance licensee cases for trial as a state prosecutor. New Jersey’s district attorney, Joe Khan, said in a statement that New Jersey is aligned with the DOJ in viewing AI CSAM as being as harmful as CSAM.

“No one is above the law, least of all someone entrusted with upholding it,” Khan said. “Our office will pursue these cases aggressively and hold offenders fully accountable, regardless of their profession or title.”