Children across the UK have experienced a significant increase in explicit deepfake imagery created using their likenesses, prompting warnings from online safety organizations about the growing accessibility of artificial intelligence tools for creating such content.
The Report Remove service, which assists in blocking intimate images from online platforms, documented a sharp rise in reports of digitally manipulated imagery. During the first six months of this year, the service received 420 reports from children describing images of themselves that had been altered or fabricated to appear explicit. This figure has already surpassed the total number of reports received throughout 2025, when 397 cases were reported.
Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, which operates Report Remove in partnership with the NSPCC children’s charity, emphasized the challenges posed by widely available AI capabilities. He noted that individuals with access to benign images of children can now create child sexual abuse material without the subjects’ knowledge or ability to prevent it. The IWF has added a specific checkbox to its reporting form to allow children to flag content as deepfaked, reflecting the volume of such submissions in recent years.
According to the IWF, the majority of manipulated image reports submitted in 2025 and 2026 met the threshold for classification as child sexual abuse material. Creating such imagery is illegal in the UK, and the government has criminalized both adapting AI models to produce abusive content and distributing such models to others. Some victims have reported being targeted for sextortion schemes, where perpetrators threaten to release the material unless recipients provide payment or additional explicit images.
Online safety experts and authorities have responded by urging stronger protections in AI products and recommending that parents and guardians limit the visibility of children’s identifiable images on social media. Recent guidance has also targeted schools, encouraging the removal of recognizable photographs of students from websites and public accounts following cases where cybercriminals scraped such images to create abusive material.
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