The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has assessed 6,310 AI-generated images that meet the legal definition of child sexual abuse in the first half of 2026, a 40% increase on the total for the whole of 2025, when more than 4,500 such images were recorded.
Rise in illegal AI material
The UK-based organisation, which monitors abuse material globally, said the number of photorealistic images investigated this year has already surpassed last year's full total. The figures cover still images only, with AI-made child sexual abuse material having risen for several years, particularly in video form.
Analysts said the majority of the images depicted girls, and children aged between seven and 13.
Calls for regulation
The IWF said the figures underlined the need for new statutory regulation on AI. Andy Burnham's government has not signalled that a 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.”
Legal measures and guidance
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.
The use of AI tools to create abuse material has led to the National Crime Agency and IWF encouraging parents and guardians to keep pictures of their children off social media. The guidance suggests making social media accounts private or sharing pictures of children through a “close friends” group only.
