US senators have launched an investigation into the game creation platform Roblox, accused of putting money before the safety of children. They accuse Roblox of being a place for sexually explicit (and often violent) “virtual experiences with children,” and have requested a series of documents and records, including details of the company’s collaborations with Sesame Street, the NFL and FIFA.
This all comes from a letter sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki by Republican Senator Josh Hawley and Democratic Senator Richard J. Durbin, who are chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism.
“You present Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five years old,” the letter reads. “But public records raise serious questions about this promise of safety. Over the past decade, police have arrested numerous people for committing acts of violence and serious harm against children they met through Roblox, including grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping, rape and even murder.” The letter includes a footnote with links to some news articles, such as this room about the death of a 17-year-old girl after meeting an older man with whom she communicated through Roblox and Discord.
“Roblox is used to exchange child pornography, participate in sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual ‘experiences’ with children, bribe and extort children to produce explicit content, and lure children into in-person meetings,” the letter continues.
The writers emphasize that in 2025, Roblox reported 65,381 cases of suspicions of child sexual exploitation at the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than double the figure from the previous year. “Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children,” they comment, “and alleged criminal activity on Roblox warrants Congressional scrutiny.”
There is an appendix with a list of “interrogatories” (i.e. questions during the pre-trial discovery phase of a court action, before the actual trial) and records. Roblox has until August 31 to submit everything.
Among other things, the Committee wants Roblox to clarify how much they earn from people in different age groups, from five to 50 and older, as well as the number of hours per day and per week these users spend on Roblox. They want to know what percentage of Roblox users aged 18 and under have parental monitoring enabled on their accounts.
They would like to know to what extent Roblox uses automated tools for child safety – for example, how many Roblox accounts reported “in connection with allegations of sexual exploitation, predation, or abuse of users under the age of 18” between 2023 and 2025 were reviewed by a human. They would like to know why Roblox’s new age verification settings don’t apply to bespoke chat features created by developers and run in games.
Other queries include “how Roblox identifies and destroys data that does not comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” and “how Roblox prevents an adult from pretending to be a child on the Roblox platform to interact with other children.” Finally, the Committee wants to know how much Roblox spends “on trust and security for each fiscal year from 2018 to 2025,” both in hard cash and as a percentage of its total operating expenses and revenue.
As for the requested documents, they include an organizational chart identifying those who worked in “trust and safety policy, content moderation or child safety” starting January 1, 2016, as well as “all documents showing revenue earned by Roblox from experiments in which exploitation, grooming or criminal conduct was later identified as having occurred.”
Other document requests concern how Roblox designs its parental controls and how it tracks predators who use multiple accounts. The subcommittee is seeking any internal assessment “of Roblox’s financial exposure if Roblox made friction-increasing changes to the Roblox platform, such as prohibiting users under the age of 13 from purchasing Robux or making purchases on the platform.” There are more specific requests for documents relating to Roblox’s collaborations with Sesame Workshop, the NFL and FIFA, including details on the “target age demographic.”
Roblox has long faced allegations that its service is unsafe for children, both in the sense of profiting from their labor and in the sense of failing to keep sexual predators out. In August 2024, Turkey banned Roblox over child safety concerns. In August 2025, Louisiana Attorney General Calls Roblox ‘The Perfect Place for Pedophiles’. In April this year, the Australian government said Roblox, alongside Steam, Minecraft and Fortnite, risked “becoming a gateway to abuse, extremist violence, radicalization or lifelong harm”.
Roblox has sought to allay these fears by, among other things, deploying facial age estimation technologies, as well as banning direct messaging for players under 13. The company’s chief security officer, Matt Kaufman, sent a comment to My city about the US Senate investigation. “Roblox is built on the foundation of security,” he writes. “We make no compromise on this commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform.”
