Roblox Signs Court-Enforceable Deal With Australia After Regulator Finds Adults Could Still Contact Kids

Roblox told the world last year it had fixed its child safety problem. Australia's regulator just proved it hadn't.

The country's eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, announced Thursday that testing conducted earlier this year found adult strangers could still send connection requests to children on Roblox without parental consent. Kids' profiles, account names, avatar images, and lists of their connections were visible to anyone on the platform, with no way to restrict who could see them. None of it triggered a parental alert.

eSafety also found adults and children could view and respond to each other's posts on forums outside the actual games, again without any parental sign-off required.

Roblox already made changes. In December 2025, the company rolled out age verification, made accounts for under-16 users private by default, and turned off direct chat until users completed age estimation, according to The Guardian. By mid-May 2026, Roblox had split users into three age tiers, restricting the youngest accounts to games with minimal content ratings and full parental controls, per Engadget. Those changes went global in June.

None of that stopped the gaps eSafety found. Roblox has now signed a court-enforceable undertaking, effectively a legal promise, to close them within three months. If the company breaks that promise, Inman Grant can ask Australia's Federal Court to force compliance.

What Roblox actually has to fix

The undertaking requires Roblox to stop adults from contacting unknown children anywhere on the platform without parental consent, make children's accounts private by default, build an accessible reporting system that actually tells users what happened to their complaint, and submit to an independent third-party audit of its safety tools, including the age-estimation technology that's supposed to catch adults posing as kids or kids posing as adults.

That audit requirement is the sharpest part of this deal. Inman Grant said Roblox can no longer "mark their own homework." Translation: the company's own assurances that it's compliant with Australian law aren't good enough anymore. An outside auditor has to check.

Roblox maintains it believes it is meeting its obligations under Australia's Online Safety Act. A company spokesperson told The Guardian there had been "constructive dialogue with eSafety" and that Roblox delivered on its prior safety commitments over the past year. Roblox did roll out real changes, and eSafety's own timeline shows two years of ongoing engagement, not a company ignoring the regulator. The problem is those changes still left holes big enough for eSafety's testers to walk through.

About 1.7 million Australian children use Roblox, according to Roy Morgan research cited by eSafety, making it the country's second-most-popular game among kids.

A Senate investigation with sharper numbers

While Australia was finalizing its agreement, Roblox was also staring down a bipartisan U.S. Senate inquiry. Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who lead the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, sent a letter to Roblox CEO David Baszucki demanding the company preserve records related to child safety and answer detailed questions about its users, revenue, and safety systems by August 31, 2026, according to Cartoon Brew.

The senators cited Roblox's own disclosure to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: 65,381 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation in 2025, more than double the 2024 total. Cartoon Brew noted that a rising report count doesn't automatically mean abuse itself doubled. It could reflect better detection tools catching more of what was already happening. But the senators say the raw scale, on a platform marketed to kids as young as five, is enough to warrant congressional scrutiny.

Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman said the platform is "built on the foundation of safety" and that the company looks forward to explaining its protections to the committee, per Cartoon Brew's reporting.

No charges have been filed against Roblox. No court has ruled the company violated any law. The Senate letter contains allegations, not findings, and Roblox has not yet had its August 31 deadline arrive as of this writing. The Australian case is a signed civil undertaking, not a verdict, though it does carry the threat of federal court enforcement if Roblox doesn't deliver.

What's not in dispute: regulators on two continents, using two different methods, both found gaps between what Roblox says its safety systems do and what independent testing showed. Roblox has three months to prove Australia's regulator wrong. The Senate letter gives it until the end of this month to start answering for the rest.