UK Children are Reporting a Surge in AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes

Children in Britain have reported a sharp rise in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, with an online safety service warning that increasingly accessible artificial intelligence tools are making such material easier to create.

Report Remove, a service that helps children prevent intimate images from appearing online, received 420 reports in the first six months of this year from children who said images of themselves had been digitally manipulated or fabricated to appear explicit.

That figure has already surpassed the 397 reports recorded for the whole of 2025.

Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which operates Report Remove with children’s charity the NSPCC, said the figures highlighted the growing difficulty of protecting children as AI image-generation tools become more capable and widely available.

“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 enough reports of manipulated images from people under 18 in recent years that it added a checkbox to its online reporting form allowing children to identify material as deepfaked.

Sexton said the figures confirmed concerns that advances in AI would be used to manipulate images of real people.

“This 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,” he said.

“Everyone in the world is at risk,” Sexton added.

The IWF, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material online, said most reports of manipulated images submitted to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were serious enough to meet the threshold for child sexual abuse material.

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is illegal in Britain. The government has also made it illegal to adapt an AI model to create such material or distribute models designed for that purpose.

Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said technology companies needed stronger safeguards in their AI products to prevent the creation of explicit material.

“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 children who reported manipulated images to Report Remove had also been targeted in sextortion schemes, in which perpetrators threaten to distribute the material unless victims pay money or provide additional explicit images.

Report Remove allows children to anonymously report intimate images or videos of themselves that have been shared with former partners, sextortion perpetrators or could be posted online.

The service converts reported images into a digital fingerprint known as a hash and shares it with major technology platforms, which can use the fingerprint to remove the image or prevent it from being uploaded.

The growing use of AI to create deepfakes has prompted warnings from British authorities about posting identifiable images of children online.

Last month, Britain’s National Crime Agency and the IWF advised parents and guardians to avoid publicly displaying photographs of children online. They recommended making social media accounts private or sharing images only with restricted groups such as “close friends.”

The advice followed cases in which cybercriminals scraped photographs of children from school websites and social media accounts, used AI tools to turn them into child sexual abuse material and then threatened to publish the images.

Schools have been urged to remove identifiable photographs of pupils from their websites and social media accounts.

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