US senators have launched an investigation of game creation platform Roblox on a broad charge of putting money before child safety. They accuse Roblox of being a venue for “sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual ‘experiences’ with children”, and have requested a range of documents and records, including details of the company’s collaborations with Sesame Street, the NFL and FIFA
All that’s from a letter sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki by Republican senator Josh Hawley and Democrat senator Richard J. Durbin, who are chairman and ranking member respectively for the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism
“You trumpet Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five,” the letter reads. “But the public record raises serious questions about this promise of safety. Over the past decade, police have arrested numerous individuals for committing serious acts of violence and harm against children they met via Roblox, including grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping, rape, and even murder.” The letter includes a footnote with links to some news stories, such as this piece about the death of a 17-year-old after meeting an older man she communicated with over Roblox and Discord.
“Roblox is being used to trade child sexual abuse material, participate in sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual ‘experiences’ with children, bribe and extort children into producing explicit content, and lure children into in-person meetings,” the letter goes on
The writers point out that in 2025, Roblox reported 65,381 instances of suspected child sexual exploitation to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, more than double the previous year’s figure. “Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children,” they comment, “and the alleged criminal activity on Roblox warrants congressional scrutiny.”
There’s an annex with a list of “interrogatories” (that is, questions during a legal action’s discovery phase, ahead of the actual trial) and records. Roblox have till 31st August to hand everything over
Amongst other things, the Committee want Roblox to specify how much they earn from people in various age brackets, from five-years-old to 50 and above, together with how many hours per day and per week those users spend on Roblox. They want to know what percentage of Roblox users aged 18 and under have parental oversight enabled on their accounts
They’d like to know how much Roblox make use of automated tools for child safety – for example, how many Roblox accounts reported “in connection with alleged sexual exploitation, predation, or abuse of users under the age of 18” across 2023-2025 were assessed by a human. They’d like to know why Roblox’s new age verification settings don’t apply to bespoke, developer-created chat features that run inside games
Other queries concern “how Roblox identifies and destroys data that are not in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act”, and “how Roblox prevents an adult from posing as a child on the Roblox Platform to interact with other children”. Finally, the Committee want to know how much Roblox spends “on trust and safety for each fiscal year from 2018 through 2025”, both in hard cash and as a percentage of their total operating expense and revenue
As for the requested records, these include an organisational chart identifying those who’ve worked in “trust and safety, content moderation, or child-safety policy” from 1st January 2016 onwards, together with “all documents showing revenue earned by Roblox from experiences in which exploitation, grooming, or criminal conduct was subsequently identified as having occurred”
Other document requests concern how Roblox design their parental controls, and how they track predators who use multiple accounts. The subcommittee are keen to get hold of any internal assessments “of Roblox’s financial exposure if Roblox made any changes that increase friction on the Roblox Platform, such as prohibiting users under 13 from purchasing Robux or making in-platform purchases”. There are more specific requests for documents relating to Roblox’s collaborations with Sesame Workshop, the NFL, and FIFA, including details of “the age demographic targeted”.
Roblox have long faced allegations that their service isn’t safe for kids, both in the sense of profiting from their labour and in the sense of failing to keep out sexual predators. Back in August 2024, Turkey banned Roblox over child safety concerns. In August 2025, Louisiana’s attorney general branded Roblox “the perfect place for paedophiles”. In April this year, the Australian government declared that Roblox alongside Steam, Minecraft, and Fortnite risk “becoming onramps to abuse, extremist violence, radicalisation or lifelong harm”.
Roblox have sought to allay these fears by, amongst other things, rolling out facial age estimation technologies, together with prohibitions on direct messaging for players under 13. The company’s chief safety officer Matt Kaufman has sent a comment to Kotaku about the US Senate investigation. “Roblox is built on the foundation of safety,” he writes. “We do not compromise on that commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform.”
