A private school in Pennsylvania is asking a court to throw out a lawsuit brought by 59 students who say it stayed quiet for months while two boys made AI-generated nude images of their classmates.
Lancaster Country Day School, a K-12 school in Lancaster County with fewer than 600 students, filed the motion this week. Two male students have already pleaded guilty to 59 felony counts of sexual abuse of children. They were sentenced to probation and 60 hours of community service each.
The school's argument
The school says it's false that it never told law enforcement. The tip it received came from the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, which is a law enforcement agency, so reporting back to that office was reporting to police.
It also says the tip was too vague to act on. No victims were named. Only one student was identified. The school interviewed that boy and his mother, and he denied it. Nobody at the school ever saw the images, and the school says everything connected to them happened off school grounds.
Rory Connaughton, an attorney for the school, told Ars Technica it's "impossible to assert that the school failed to report to law enforcement when law enforcement provided the tip to the school and the school reported back to law enforcement." He argued the attorney general's office could have referred the case to local police or investigated itself.
A spokesperson for that office told LancasterOnline it doesn't investigate tips. It passes them to the relevant school or police.
What the students allege
The lawsuit describes something much worse than a paperwork failure. The girls say they went to school every day while deepfake nudes of them circulated in the school community, and that the school never suspended the boys even as the upper school fell into what they called acute panic.
They allege the school discouraged them from going to police, withheld information from parents, and obstructed the investigation, including by refusing to hand over a yearbook photo detectives wanted for comparison. They also allege that an assistant head of the upper school told parents "boys will be boys" and took no action.
Beyond the emotional harm, the suit claims the girls were denied equal access to their education, and accuses the school of violating Title IX by being deliberately indifferent to harassment that was severe and pervasive.
The legal gap the school is standing in
Pennsylvania has since made this conduct explicitly criminal. Governor Josh Shapiro signed Act 125 in October 2024, which made it a crime to intentionally view, possess or control child sexual abuse material or any AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Act 35 followed in July 2025, covering forged digital likenesses. The state Department of Education now publishes guidance for schools and families on exactly this, and it tells anyone who finds AI-generated sexual images of a child to report to law enforcement first.
None of that existed when this happened. The conduct dates to 2023.
So the school is arguing two things at once. Possessing AI images wasn't a defined crime then, and separately, the child-abuse definition that triggers a school's mandatory reporting duty still doesn't clearly cover child-on-child AI images. It points to Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams, who declined to charge the school for failing to report, on the grounds that AI pornography didn't fall under crimes defined as child abuse.
The school even cites the legislature against the plaintiffs. If lawmakers are still working to close this gap, it argues, the duty can't have existed already.
The bills that keep citing this case
Those lawmakers keep pointing back at this school. House Bill 2474 would require schools and other mandated reporters to notify law enforcement immediately when they learn of suspected AI-generated CSAM. It passed the Pennsylvania House unanimously in May 2026. Senate Bill 1050 would require mandated reporters to report all child sexual abuse material they learn about, including material produced by a minor.
Legislators backing the bills have repeatedly referenced the Lancaster Country Day case, where investigators found the two students had generated images of 48 female classmates plus a dozen other acquaintances.
Another Pennsylvania school in a similar situation did call police, though only after finishing its own internal investigation. A middle school student there had targeted 11 female classmates. Lawmakers argue that waiting for an internal probe to finish costs evidence and prolongs the harm.
Where this goes
On the aiding and abetting claims, it acknowledges case law is split, which means a judge could let some negligence claims survive.
Its fallback is that the girls can't show the school knew the images existed or helped spread them. "The sole nexus to LCDS in the Complaint is that the Student Plaintiffs and the harassers were all students of the school," the filing says.
The girls' complaint says the school also failed to provide counseling and support after the abuse was confirmed. A judge will decide whether a school that received a tip from the attorney general, interviewed one boy, and closed the file did enough.
Sources
Ars Technica: High school defends staying silent while boys made AI nudes of 59 classmates
Pennsylvania Department of Education: Act 125 and Deep Fakes
Pennsylvania Senate: Senate Passes Bill to Protect Young People from AI Generated CSAM
