AI-generated child sexual abuse material surging, warns Internet Watch Foundation

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is proliferating online, with the amount of illegal material investigated this year already exceeding the total for 2025.

Analysts at the Internet Watch Foundation have found more photorealistic child sexual abuse material in the first half of 2026 than for the whole of the prior year. The UK-based IWF, which monitors abuse material globally, said it had assessed 6,310 AI images that met the legal definition of child sexual abuse, 40% higher than last year’s total of more than 4,500.

Instances of AI-made child sexual abuse material have been rising for several years, with a huge surge in videos in particular, although the latest IWF figures refer to still images only. The majority of the images seen by analysts were of girls, and of children aged seven to 13.

The IWF said the figures underlined the need for new statutory regulation on AI.

Andy Burnham’s government has not signalled that a new bill focused on the technology is imminent. Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI minister, has said “nothing is off the table” in terms of fresh regulation, but that the test for any legislative proposal will be: “Will it make the British people safer?”

Hannah Swirsky, the head of policy at the IWF, said she backed calls from parliamentarians for “binding legislation on AI” to compel companies to build safer models. “It is incumbent on tech companies to build tools which cannot be abused this way,” she said. This problem has been created by technology, and if companies won’t build tools which are safe by design.”

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is illegal in the UK and the government has also made it illegal to adapt an AI model to create abuse material or to distribute such models to others. Developing a model designed to produce hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material carries a criminal sentence of up to five years.

A government spokesperson said: “UK law is clear that child sexual abuse material is illegal, regardless of whether it is AI-generated or not. We are going further by banning AI models that are used to create this type of abuse material and produce sickening, hyper-realistic imagery that often contains the likeness of real children.”

AI has also enabled online predators to create explicit images of children. The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, has received 420 reports from children concerning images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear explicit. The number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397.