Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or \u2018nudified\u2019 content easier to produce<\/p>\n
Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.<\/p>\n
The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or \u201cfaked\u201d in some way, including with AI and nudification tools.<\/p>\n
In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports from children of images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear explicit. The number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397.<\/p>\n
Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which operates Report Remove alongside the NSPCC children\u2019s charity, said the figures underscored the difficulty of preventing online images from being manipulated in an age of widely available and capable AI tools.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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 \u2013 or not putting pictures of themselves online,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Report Remove has received so many reports of manipulated images from under-18s in recent years that it has added a check box to its online submission form allowing them to flag the material as deepfaked.<\/p>\n
Sexton said the figures confirmed a fear that AI would improve in capability and be used to manipulate images of real people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of the harms we were worried about when we first saw AI image generators being used, that they would be used to create child sexual abuse material featuring real children,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone in the world is at risk,\u201d Sexton added.<\/p>\n
The IWF, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material [CSAM] online, said the majority of the reports of manipulated images made to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were so severe that 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 to distribute such models to others.<\/p>\n
Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said tech companies must put stronger safety protections in their AI products to prevent the creation of explicit material.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis rise in children reaching out because fake or AI\u2011generated sexual images have been created of them is alarming but also sadly predictable,\u201d she said. \u201cTech companies cannot keep pushing out AI products without embedding strong protections that prevent this material from being created in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sexton said some victims who had contacted Report Remove about manipulated images had been targeted for sextortion, where a blackmailer threatens to publish the material unless they receive financial payment or demands more explicit images from the victim.<\/p>\n
Report Remove is a service that allows children to anonymously flag intimate images or videos of themselves that have been sent to former partners, sextortion fraudsters or could appear online. The service turns those images into a \u201chash\u201d, or digital fingerprint, which is shared with major tech platforms, which can take the image down or prevent it from being uploaded.<\/p>\n