Missouri Has Demanded Xbox Submit a Child Safety Plan. Here Is What the AG’s Office Is Asking For.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced on October 1 that her office has sent a formal demand to Xbox requiring the platform to submit a plan addressing how it has allegedly been used to contact, groom, and exploit children. Xbox has 30 days from receipt of the letter to respond.

What prompted the action

The demand follows two specific cases involving Missouri children.

In July 2026, Bryan Nevin was charged with first-degree harassment and stalking after targeting and harassing a Missouri child on Xbox. The case further escalated when Nevin showed up uninvited at the child’s home.

In September 2026, Michael Moya was arrested after misrepresenting his age on the platform and exchanging sexually explicit messages and materials with a Missouri child.

Both cases involved adults using Xbox’s communication features to contact a minor, and both followed a pattern the AG’s office describes as finding, contacting, grooming, and exploiting children through the platform.

What the AG’s office identified

The demand letter sets out seven areas of concern.

The first is age verification. The AG’s office argues that Xbox’s age verification procedures are inadequate or easily bypassed beyond users’ self-reported age, meaning the platform has no reliable way to confirm whether a user claiming to be an adult actually is one.

The second is default settings and parental controls. The office found that default settings for minor accounts are ineffective, including limits on chat and other forms of written or audio communication. Parental tools do not provide adequate remote management of minor users’ accounts.

The third is safeguards for voice and text chat. The AG’s office found insufficient protections against grooming or inappropriate behaviour through the platform’s communication features.

The fourth is reporting tools. The office identified weak or confusing reporting mechanisms and slow responses to user reports, particularly in cases involving potential imminent harm to a minor.

The fifth is warnings for minor users. The AG’s office found a lack of adequate information and warnings provided to minor users about safe use and the risks of communicating with strangers on the platform.

The sixth is measurement. The office identified a lack of adequate systems to measure and evaluate whether safety measures are actually working, including their specific impact on minor users.

The seventh is content and maturity restrictions. The AG’s office found these to be inadequate for minor users.

What Xbox must now do

Xbox has 30 days from receipt of the letter to respond with a plan that satisfies the concerns outlined across all seven areas. The plan must include sufficient age verification requirements. Beyond that, the letter does not specify what an acceptable response would look like, leaving it to Xbox to propose the measures it would take.

The design dimension

The seven concerns the AG identified are all design and product decisions. Age verification is an onboarding flow. Default settings are interface choices. Parental controls are a product feature. Reporting tools are a design system. Warnings are content decisions. Measurement is a product infrastructure question. Content restrictions are enforcement mechanisms.

Fairpatterns detects where these design decisions fall short of what regulators and courts are now expecting, automatically, across platforms and at scale.