Mo Explains
Last updated: 2026-10-13
My 7-year-old has a phone that isn't turned on. She can FaceTime us over Wi-Fi and that's about it, so when this trend hit the news I wasn't worried about her seeing it. My 16-year-old is a different story, because she's on the same apps everyone else is on, and this spread through TikTok and Snapchat in about a week.
What surprised me most wasn't that kids did it. Kids have always done dumb things. It was that the image tools let them. The big image generators have filters that are supposed to refuse this kind of thing, and kids got around them anyway, whether by wording the prompt carefully or by generating the cat and pasting it onto a real photo of their school.
What the Cat in the Hat AI trend actually is
It's a horror-movie edit of the Cat in the Hat, usually the Mike Myers version, pasted into real places with a threat attached.
The trend started as fictional horror posts in Ireland and the UK in August, then jumped to US TikTok and Snapchat. The copycats are what caused the problem. Kids used AI image tools to put the character outside their own school, under the town water tower, or on what looks like security-camera footage, and added captions like "look familiar?" or "I'm coming for every single person." Some posts listed students' first names or a school's initials.
The character isn't the issue. Tennessee's deputy homeland security commissioner put it plainly to the New York Times: reimagining the Cat is fine, and the problem starts when the image is paired with a threat. The FBI said the same thing. Posting the video isn't a crime. Pairing it with a threat against a school or a student can be.
Why police can't just ignore a fake
Once a post names a school, officers have to find who's behind it and rule out a real threat, and that takes the same work whether the picture is AI or not.
The police departments involved have described what that looks like: interviewing students, tracing accounts, preserving evidence, contacting the platforms, and putting extra officers on campus until it's cleared. Sheriffs in St. Johns County and Citrus County, Florida both said they reviewed every reported post and found no credible danger. Schools still went on lockdown, some switched to remote learning for a day, and parents still got the 6 a.m. robocall.
So the kid who posted it as a joke created a real police response, and that's what they get charged for.
Who got arrested
More than ten kids across at least eight states, and the youngest was 12.
In Berwick, Louisiana, police arrested four girls aged 13 to 15 and charged three with terrorizing. The chief's line stuck with me: "Once you hit POST, you do not get to decide how seriously law enforcement takes it." In Pasco County, Florida, a 12-year-old was charged with written threats to kill. From there it's a list: a 14-year-old in Colorado, a 15-year-old in Kansas, an eighth grader in Connecticut, and more in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.
In Kentucky, where the FBI helped local police find one poster, threatening a school is a felony that can carry up to five years. An FBI agent in Wisconsin said most of these come from high schoolers or younger who genuinely think it's a joke, and that's the part worth saying out loud at dinner.
What to tell your kid
Three rules: don't make one, don't share one, and screenshot and report any you see.
The FBI's reporting steps are simple enough to text to a teenager:
- Screenshot the post so the username, date and time are visible.
- Report it to a school administrator or local police.
- Flag it on the platform.
If your kid is the type to make one, the Berwick chief's quote is the conversation. The post doesn't belong to them after they hit send.
The bigger thing this made me think about
The guardrails will catch up. The scam calls are the part I'd actually plan for.
People found ways around the image filters this time, and I believe that gap closes. The tools get patched, the platforms get better at flagging, and this specific trend will look dated by spring. What it made me think about is kids and AI more broadly. A lot of kids now carry real phones with real numbers, and the same kind of tool can clone a voice. The FBI is already warning about scam calls that use a cloned kid's voice to tell a parent there's been an emergency, and a California mother sent $5,000 before she learned her daughter was fine. It's the same umbrella as the cat posts, people getting duped by AI, and a family code word handles it.
These are the kinds of things that are going to need rules, and I know there's a lot of movement in government on that right now. What I like is that the response here was fast. Schools, sheriffs and the FBI were all saying the same three things within two weeks of the first US posts. AI moves fast, so the response has to be fast too.
One thing I can't tell you is how to spot which posts are AI-made, and it doesn't matter. An AI image can still carry a real threat, which is why the advice is to report all of them and let the school and the police sort it out.
If your kid saw one of these and didn't post or share it, they did the right thing. Tell them so, then show them the three steps.
Related reading: How to spot AI fake images | ChatGPT for Teens: what parents can control | AI scams are draining billions | New to AI? Start here
