Roblox is under investigation.
According to reports, a bipartisan investigation by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, and the deadline for Roblox to hand over documents is 31 August.
"You trumpet Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five," the senators wrote to CEO David Baszucki. "But the public record raises serious questions about this promise of safety."
Hawley will lead the subcommittee, Durbin is ranking member. The investigators are high ranking members of the senate and quite experienced in Child Safety measures.
What they're demanding
The Senate ordered Roblox to preserve all records touching child safety, child sexual or physical abuse, bullying, and financial exploitation.
There are some specific reports.
- Reports received in 2023, 2024 and 2025 concerning sexual exploitation, predation or abuse of under-18 users
- How Roblox responds to those reports
- How many accounts were reported for that conduct across those years
- What share of allegations were reviewed by a person rather than automated systems
- What share of reported accounts were banned
- Bullying reports involving under-18s across the same period, with investigation and ban rates
Human review is the biggest issue. Automated moderation at Roblox's scale is unavoidable, and asking what percentage of exploitation allegations a human actually looked at is a way of testing whether the safety apparatus is a system or a filter.
The allegations
The senators' ask is quite extensive "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 cited documents show that Roblox reported more than 65,000 suspected child exploitation cases to the NCMEC in 2025, over double the 2024 figure.
Roblox would probably claim. a doubling in reports to NCMEC can reflect improved detection and reporting practices as easily as worsening harm on a platform.
The letter ends: "Let us be clear: children on your platform are hurting. Congress will not look the other way."
Roblox's answer
Roblox' own Chief safety officer Matt Kaufman stated that the platform is "built on the foundation of safety," he said. "We do not compromise on that commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform."
There was some changes recently. Under-13s blocked from direct messaging also, global facial age checks required for chat access. A sensitive-issues content descriptor for experiences. Tighter moderation policy. Age verification adoption reached 57% globally by Q2, with the US and UK closer to 70% and Australia near 80%.
Whether any of that arrived early enough is what the document production will speak to.
The legal pile-up
Currently Roblox is also sued in Louisiana and Los Angeles County. Roblox settled with Alabama, Nevada and West Virginia for a combined 35 million dollars, with no admission of wrongdoing.
On the other side of the world, Australia's government has raised its own concerns, describing them as of deep concern to parents and carers.
There's also a securities class action alleging investors weren't adequately warned that safety changes would hit monetisation, which sits awkwardly beside the Senate's accusation that the company chose revenue over safety.
Roblox has until the end of the month to give the reports.
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