Thorn: AI for Child Safety at Scale
Julie Cordua
Stanford CS153: Technology Entrepreneurship — Infra @ Scale (Winter 2025) · Day 7 · Jordan Hall 420-040
In this compelling and critically important talk, Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children online, unveiled the staggering scale of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and the innovative technological solutions Thorn is deploying to combat it. The discussion navigated the harrowing realities of online child exploitation while simultaneously highlighting the profound potential of technology, particularly **artificial intelligence (AI)**, to safeguard vulnerable populations. Cordua's presentation underscored the urgent need for tech companies to move beyond passive compliance and actively leverage advanced tools to enforce their terms of service, protect children, and assist law enforcement in the most challenging of investigations.
AI review
Julie Cordua delivers an honest, mission-driven talk about Thorn's AI infrastructure for CSAM detection at scale. The work is real, the stakes are undeniable, and the SmugMug rescue story is a genuine proof point for predictive classifiers over hash matching. But this is a mission talk with technical texture, not an engineering talk with mission context — the architecture is described at a level that informs without enabling, and engineers leave knowing what Thorn built but not how to build anything like it themselves.