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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Roblox, Discord, OpenAI and Google were among the founding partners of ROOST—short for Robust Open Online Safety Tools—announced on February 10, 2025. It is an independent nonprofit building free, open-source infrastructure for online safety, with an initial emphasis on detecting, reviewing and reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). As of August 2026, ROOST is an active project with published software, repositories and partner organizations—not a consumer parental-control app or a guarantee that children are safe on any platform.
What ROOST is designed to do
ROOST describes itself as a global nonprofit creating online-safety tools as a public good. Its premise is that smaller platforms and public-interest organizations often cannot afford to build sophisticated moderation systems independently. Shared, inspectable infrastructure could reduce duplicated work and connect the stages of safety operations: detection, investigation, human review, enforcement, reporting and compliance.
The initiative addresses a fragmented problem. A bad actor may move between a game, a messaging service, a social network and an AI product, while each service uses different rules and consoles. Generative AI can also increase the volume and sophistication of harmful or manipulated material. ROOST presents open software as one way to make safety technology more accessible and auditable, but that rationale is not evidence that abuse has been eliminated.
ROOST’s mission and project list are published at roost.tools, with source code in its GitHub organization.
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Who founded and supports it?
The February 10, 2025 announcement identified these founding partners or supporters:
- Roblox
- Discord
- OpenAI
- Eric Schmidt
- John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
- AI Collaborative
- Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
- Project Liberty Institute
ROOST’s later partnerships page lists a wider ecosystem, including Bluesky, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Cinder, Common Crawl, GitHub, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Mozilla, Match Group, Wikimedia and Zoom. Those organizations should be understood as later partners or collaborators, not all as launch-day founders.
What the major companies represent
Roblox said it would contribute large-scale moderation expertise and co-chair ROOST’s technology advisory committee. Its separately announced open-source voice-safety classifier is a Roblox project, not automatically a ROOST product (Roblox’s announcement).
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Discord pledged funding, technology and employee expertise; its chief legal officer, Clint Smith, was named board chair in the launch announcement (Discord’s announcement). Discord’s consumer feature called Ignore, announced in the same post, is separate from ROOST.
Google and OpenAI are founding partners. ROOST’s Coop documentation also identifies integrations with the Google Content Safety API and OpenAI Moderation API. ROOST is not operated by either company, and those APIs are not presented as mandatory for every deployment.
What tools does ROOST offer?
Osprey: rules and investigation at event scale
Osprey is described as a high-performance rules and investigation engine for real-time abuse response. Organizations can write rules for their own threats and policies, query events and patterns, and trigger automated enforcement. It is self-hostable, allowing an organization to retain control of its data. ROOST says Osprey is used by Bluesky, Discord and Matrix; its source is available at github.com/roostorg/osprey.
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ROOST’s Bluesky case study claims that Osprey processes more than 45 million events per day, supports more than 100,000 daily automated enforcement actions and cut annual data-storage costs by approximately 70 percent. These are claims in a ROOST-published case study, not independently audited performance results.
Coop: moderation and review workflows
Coop is an open-source review platform for content flagged by automated systems or user reports. Its documented features include review queues, role-based access controls, routing rules, manual and automated actions, and audit logs. It supports policy categories such as harassment, spam, fraud, terrorism and violent extremism, and child safety. The source repository is github.com/roostorg/coop.
For child-safety operations, ROOST describes workflows involving hash matching, NCMEC CyberTipline reporting, and integrations with the Google Content Safety API and OpenAI Moderation API. ROOST calls Coop the first free, end-to-end CSAM detection, review and NCMEC-reporting workflow. That description does not mean the software guarantees accurate detection, legal compliance or correct reporting. Organizations still need trained reviewers, secure handling of sensitive material, escalation procedures, written policies and jurisdiction-specific legal advice.
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ROOST also identifies Musubi as a third-party provider of a hosted Coop option. The reviewed material does not establish current pricing.
ROOST Model Community
The ROOST Model Community connects model developers, model creators and trust-and-safety practitioners. It aims to set participation criteria and make open, inspectable safety models easier to discover and use. An open model is not automatically accurate, unbiased or production-ready; teams must test it against their own languages, users, adversarial behavior and tolerance for false positives.
What “child safety” means here
In ROOST’s launch materials, child safety primarily means detecting suspected CSAM, routing it for review, improving classifiers and supporting reporting workflows. It also includes infrastructure for moderators and the use of language models in safety operations.
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ROOST is not a universal age-verification system, a database that identifies every dangerous person, a replacement for law enforcement or child-protection agencies, or a parent-installed monitoring app. It does not guarantee safety on Roblox, Discord, Google or OpenAI products. CSAM is also only one part of child safety; grooming, sextortion, harmful contact, cyberbullying and age assurance involve different signals and safeguards.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How a responsible child-safety workflow works
- Detection: hashes, classifiers, user reports or rules identify material or behavior for review.
- Investigation: authorized staff examine related events, accounts and patterns using tools such as Osprey.
- Human review: trained reviewers make decisions, document uncertainty and escalate serious cases.
- Enforcement: a platform may remove material, restrict an account or take another policy-defined action.
- Reporting and preservation: where legally required, the organization submits reports and preserves relevant evidence securely.
Automation can prioritize work, but it cannot remove the need for reviewer protection, appeals, quality checks, access controls and legal oversight.
Why open-source infrastructure could help
- Lower entry costs: smaller services may start with software they could not build from scratch.
- Auditability: inspectable code can be tested and scrutinized instead of treated as an opaque vendor service.
- Customization: teams can adapt rules and queues to their own policies and threat models.
- Interoperability: shared components may connect detection, review and reporting systems.
- Self-hosting: organizations can keep greater control over sensitive data.
- Shared maintenance: improvements can benefit multiple services.
“Free” describes the software license, not the total operating cost. Engineering, cloud infrastructure, security, moderator staffing, reviewer wellbeing, legal advice and any external APIs or hosted services still require resources.
Limits, risks and unanswered governance questions
- Detection systems produce both false positives and false negatives; a classifier cannot replace human judgment.
- Self-hosting can reduce third-party exposure but does not remove breach, insider-access or retention risks.
- Publishing safety code creates a transparency benefit while potentially revealing methods that abusers could try to evade.
- Reporting, evidence preservation, privacy and notice duties vary by country and, in some places, by state or province.
- Shared software does not create shared policies, taxonomies or cross-platform willingness to exchange signals.
- Organizations must decide who reviews borderline cases, protects reviewers from traumatic exposure, handles appeals and updates rules.
- Models need evaluation across languages, cultures, synthetic media and text-only grooming attempts.
- No independent evidence in the cited material demonstrates that ROOST has reduced child exploitation or made participating platforms measurably safer.
ROOST’s timeline and current status
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| February 10, 2025 | Discord and Roblox announced ROOST during Safer Internet Day 2025 (Discord; Roblox). |
| February 10, 2025 | Launch materials described free tools for CSAM detection, review and reporting, plus technical support for adopters. |
| By August 2026 | ROOST listed Osprey and Coop as active 1.0 projects and described its Model Community as active (roost.tools). |
| August 17, 2026 | The ROOST GitHub organization showed recent repository updates. That indicates continued development, not widespread adoption or proven effectiveness. |
Who should consider using it?
ROOST is aimed primarily at online platforms, public-interest organizations, trust-and-safety teams and moderators—not individual parents. Osprey may suit an organization with engineering capacity and real-time event data. Coop may suit a team that needs controlled queues, audit logs and review workflows. Neither is a turnkey solution for an organization that lacks trained reviewers, secure infrastructure or legal and safeguarding processes.
Before deployment, an organization should establish ownership of decisions, reviewer training and support, data-retention limits, access controls, incident response, evaluation metrics, appeals and reporting obligations. It should also determine whether self-hosting, a hosted service or external APIs fit its security and regulatory requirements.
Bottom line
ROOST is best understood as an open-source safety-infrastructure nonprofit, announced on February 10, 2025 and still active in 2026. Its Osprey engine, Coop review platform and Model Community could lower the technical barrier for organizations that need moderation and CSAM-reporting workflows. Their real-world value depends on careful deployment, adequately trained people, secure operations and measurable independent evaluation. ROOST can provide building blocks; it cannot by itself guarantee that children are safe online.
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