Representative Cathy Love, sponsor: Representative Cathy Love (House District 85) opened a hearing on House Bill 82, saying the bill, brought by the Montana Department of Justice, is intended to update state law to address online grooming and AI-enabled exploitation of children.

The bill would create a distinct offense for grooming a child for sexual offenses, add language that allows undercover law enforcement to act in place of a child for certain online offenses, criminalize computer- or AI-generated child sexual images, and make related extortion a crime, proponents told the House Judiciary Committee.

Attorney General Austin Knudson, administrator of the Montana Department of Justice, said the proposal would "create the new crime of grooming a child for sexual offenses" and would fix gaps prosecutors are seeing in cases that began as online enticement. "Technology is changing, and this is behavior that we are seeing more and more of," Knudson told the committee.

Assistant Attorney General Selene Koepke, who helped draft the bill, told lawmakers the measure would add the undercover-officer language to multiple statutes (including indecent exposure, patronizing prostitution statutes, sexual abuse of children and child sexual trafficking statutes). She said some district courts have refused to apply enhanced penalties where the only "victim" was an undercover officer, and the language is meant to provide consistency so law enforcement can stop predators before hands-on harm occurs. "The grooming law is designed to catch an offender before it reaches that point of actual hands-on victimization," Koepke said.

Brian Cassidy of the Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation (the state's Internet Crimes Against Children task force) testified the state is receiving thousands of cyber tips each year and that the 2024 total was about 2,640 tips statewide. Cassidy described a large rise in reports of "text enticement" after the federal Report Act expanded mandatory reporting to include enticement text conversations; he said Montana received 921 text-enticement tips from Snapchat alone after the federal change.

Proponents from law enforcement and advocacy groups — including the Montana Family Foundation, the Montana Police Protective Association and the Montana Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association — spoke in favor of the bill. Tammy Hinderman of the Office of the State Public Defender attended as an informational witness and did not take a position, saying her office had been asked to provide a fiscal note.

Committee members asked about safeguards to avoid criminalizing peer-to-peer teenage flirting. Koepke said the grooming offense requires a pattern of engagement and is not meant to criminalize a one-off message between near-peer classmates; prosecutorial discretion and youth-court options would guide charging decisions.

Other committee questions covered how cyber tips reach law enforcement (many platforms report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which then routes tips to state task forces), the limits of platform encryption (end-to-end encryption on some services reduces the number of tips), and the difficulty of defining AI in statute because the technology is rapidly changing.

Representative Love closed by urging a do-pass recommendation.

The hearing record shows extensive testimony and no committee vote recorded in the transcript excerpt.