Children in the UK are reporting a sharp rise in explicit deepfake images made from their own likenesses, according to a safety watchdog warning that AI is making such abuse easier to create.
Report Remove, a service that blocks intimate images from appearing online, said it had seen a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or faked using AI and nudification tools. In the first six months of this year, it received 420 reports from children about images they believed had been faked or manipulated to look explicit. That already exceeds the 397 reports received in all of 2025.
Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, which operates Report Remove with the NSPCC, said the figures highlighted how hard it is to stop online images from being manipulated in an age of widely available AI tools. “If someone can take a benign image of a child from the internet and create child sexual abuse material with it, there is nothing that child can do to stop it from happening apart from preventing anyone from taking pictures of them – or not putting pictures of themselves online,” he said.
Report Remove has received so many manipulated-image reports from under-18s that it has added a checkbox to its submission form so children can flag material as deepfaked. Sexton said the figures confirmed fears that AI would improve and be used to manipulate images of real people. He added: “Everyone in the world is at risk.”
The IWF, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material online, said most manipulated-image reports made to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were so severe they passed the CSAM threshold. AI-generated CSAM is illegal in the UK, and the government has made it illegal to adapt an AI model to create abuse material or distribute such models.
Rani Govender, online safety expert at the NSPCC, said tech companies must build stronger safety protections into AI products. “This rise in children reaching out because fake or AI-generated sexual images have been created of them is alarming but also sadly predictable,” she said. “Tech companies cannot keep pushing out AI products without embedding strong protections that prevent this material from being created in the first place.”
Sexton said some victims who contacted Report Remove about manipulated images had been targeted for sextortion, where a blackmailer threatens to publish material unless the victim pays or sends more explicit images. Report Remove lets children anonymously flag intimate images or videos and turns them into a hash, or digital fingerprint, shared with major platforms so they can take the content down or block uploads.
The rise of AI-enabled deepfakes has prompted warnings about posting identifiable pictures of children online. Last month, the National Crime Agency and IWF encouraged parents and guardians to keep children’s pictures out of public view, such as by making social media accounts private or sharing images through a close-friends group. The guidance followed cases where cybercriminals had scraped pictures of children from school websites, used AI to turn them into abuse material, and blackmailed schools. Schools have been urged to remove identifiable pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts.
Source: The Guardian