Key facts
- Children in the UK are reporting a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses.
A UK safety watchdog has reported a significant increase in children reporting explicit deepfake images of themselves, with AI tools making such content easier to produce. The number of reports in the first six months of this year has already surpassed the total for 2025.
The increasing ease with which AI can generate explicit deepfakes of children poses a significant threat to their safety and privacy, highlighting the urgent need for stronger technological safeguards and public awareness campaigns.
Children in the UK are increasingly reporting the creation and spread of explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, a trend exacerbated by the proliferation of advanced AI tools. The Report Remove service, run by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in partnership with the NSPCC, has seen a dramatic rise in such reports.
In the first six months of this year, Report Remove received 420 reports from children concerning images that had been digitally manipulated or faked to appear explicit, a figure that has already surpassed the total of 397 reports received throughout 2025. Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the IWF, highlighted the challenges in preventing online image manipulation, stating that widely available AI tools make it easier to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from benign images.
Sexton confirmed that this rise in AI-generated CSAM involving real children was a significant concern. The IWF noted that the majority of manipulated image reports made to Report Remove in recent years met the CSAM threshold, which is illegal in the UK. Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, called on tech companies to embed robust safety protections into their AI products to prevent the creation of such harmful content.
Some victims have also been subjected to sextortion, where blackmailers threaten to publish deepfake explicit material unless demands are met. The IWF uses a hashing system to share digital fingerprints of flagged images with tech platforms to prevent their dissemination. In response to these trends, the National Crime Agency and IWF have advised parents to limit public online sharing of children's photos and for schools to remove identifiable images of pupils from their websites.