Coop 1.0: World’s First Free, Open Source Child Safety Infrastructure for Every Platform

More people are building online spaces than ever before, and every one of them inherits the same responsibility to keep users safe. But the tooling to do that — especially for child safety — has long been opaque and centralized, locked inside the largest platforms and out of reach for everyone else. Meanwhile, the surfaces that need protecting keep multiplying: chat, AI companions, user-generated media, each with its own risks. Safety tools have to be flexible enough to meet all of them. That's true for child safety, and it's true across every category of harm.

ROOST is proud to release Coop 1.0 , the world’s first free, open source content review and enforcement system that any organization can configure, self-host, and build on. Coop integrates with leading child safety detection tools out of the box, processes content review workflows at scale, and files reports directly to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). For the first time, any organization, regardless of size or budget, has a free, production-ready way to review, act on, and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM), end to end.

ROOST released Coop v0 in February, and now, after months of development, open source collaboration, contributions from the community, production deployments, and industry feedback, version 1.0 proves that a community building shared safety infrastructure can produce a tool as capable and reliable as anything built behind closed doors at big tech companies with large teams and budgets. Coop 1.0 is designed to help teams manage multiple workflows across varying harm areas, manage detected abuse efficiently, protect reviewer wellbeing, and enforce policy consistently, all on their own infrastructure, with full control over their data.

“At the heart of all safety teams is the need for scaled review, auditable decisions, intentional automation, and accurate decisions. Coop 1.0 brings together the core features that safety teams need to stay agile in a changing landscape whether you’re a two-person startup for fans or an enterprise platform serving millions of users. Everyone deserves safety and the ability to customize their tools for their ecosystem. Coop provides a strong foundation for anyone who wants to protect their users in their own way.”

As an open source tool, organizations of all sizes and shapes are able to adopt Coop 1.0 and integrate it into their safety operations at no charge.

One Coop adopter, which serves tens of millions of users across consumer and enterprise contexts, estimates an ~95% reduction in annual safety tooling costs since moving to a self-hosted deployment of Coop.

For Kyodo , a community-first messaging platform with over 150 million messages sent, Coop meant catching threats that went previously undetected:

"Coop allowed us to take user safety to a whole other level, especially on the child safety side...I love this tool...It has totally transformed how we protect people, especially kids, and the support from ROOST has been impeccable"

Why Global Open Source Safety Infrastructure Matters

In the first six months of 2025, online enticement reports to NCMEC ’s CyberTipline jumped 77%, and child sex trafficking reports surged 952%. NCMEC called it a “ wake-up call. ”

With the expansion of AI across the globe, online harms are accelerating at a pace difficult for platforms of all sizes to detect, mitigate, or manage. The tools available haven't kept up and lack the flexibility needed to adapt. Larger companies can build internal safety infrastructure, but most do so in isolation with each organization solving the same problems independently, none of them able to share what they've learned. Smaller platforms often have no real options at all: enterprise vendors are priced out of reach, and building in-house requires engineering capacity most teams don't have.

Courts and lawmakers around the world are now working to establish that platforms must protect children online, but a legal mandate doesn’t write the code. Regulation may set the standard, but open source infrastructure is how the rest of the internet meets it.

Coop is that infrastructure.

Meet Coop 1.0

Version 1.0 is Coop’s first major release. It is production-ready for self-hosted deployment by platforms of any size and free for any organization to adopt, inspect, and build on. It focuses on better integrations, improved stability, and feature additions driven by early feedback across three areas:

Easier to get started: We significantly simplified self-hosted deployment and completely rewrote the documentation. The new structure separates the docs into four distinct sections — user guide, development guide, API reference, and integrations — so developers, contributors, and self-hosters can find what they need without wading through everything else.

Expanded features and capability: Several improvements came directly from platforms running Coop in production: better handling of user history, auto-refreshing action lists, improved investigation tooling, and a cleaner experience setting Coop up. On the child safety side, NCMEC reports now automatically include IP address data alongside other fixes to the submission pipeline. A new admin settings UI surfaces configuration options that previously required direct database access: toggling appeals, configuring SSO, setting strike TTLs, requiring moderators to select a policy reason before acting, and granular per-permission role controls are all now available in the UI. ROOST is grateful to NCMEC for their engagement with this work, ensuring quality reporting becomes accessible to a larger number of organizations through Coop.

Reliability and sustainability: We've invested in fixes, security hardening, and structural improvements to ensure Coop is production-ready and well-positioned as a critical open source project.

Get Started with Coop 1.0

Coop is available today as source code and Docker images. To get started with your self-hosted deployment, check out our deployment guide . You can also join our biweekly public working group meetings , explore the GitHub repo , and find community support on our Discord server .

Coop + Osprey: A Modern, Robust Safety Stack for the AI Era

Coop doesn’t exist in isolation. It is part of ROOST’s broader vision for a complete, open source trust and safety stack to help detect and mitigate online harms.

At ROOST, we organize this vision around the DIRE framework , which stands for Detection, Investigation, Review, Enforcement. These four core functions are what every platform needs in order to manage online harms effectively.

Osprey helps platforms automate the obvious and investigate the ambiguous. It is a tool that helps with Detection and Investigation (D and I). Osprey tracks behavioral signals, identifies coordinated abuse, and supports investigations across systems.

Coop helps with Review and Enforcement (R and E) by managing the human review layer, routing content to the right queues, and executing enforcement decisions.

For example, when a piece of content gets flagged, Coop will route it to a reviewer, provide the context they need to make a good decision, and record what happened. As platforms face more sophisticated threats, like coordinated networks of abusers, Osprey layers in to help platforms stay ahead.

Right now, Coop and Osprey operate independently, and we are actively building toward interoperability. We’re actively building towards human reviewers inside Coop being able to see what Osprey is flagging, making enforcement decisions, and feeding those decisions back into Osprey's detection logic. This then creates a continuously improving safety system that gets smarter over time.

Together, along with models released through the ROOST Model Community , these modular blocks represent what ROOST is building: open source infrastructure that covers the full arc of how organizations detect, investigate, review, and act when it comes to online harms.

ROOST was founded to change this globally and to make safety tooling open, robust, and accessible to all. This 1.0 release would not be possible without the contributors and community who helped shape, design, and build Coop.

We are a nonprofit guided by the belief that the tools we build should be governed by the people who use them. When we make safety tools like Coop and Osprey open source, we foster collaboration. The internet, as a result, gets safer, faster.

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ROOST is building towards a future where open source is the industry standard for online safety infrastructure. Coop 1.0 is another step in that direction.