AI-generated child sexual abuse material is proliferating online, with the amount of illegal material investigated this year already exceeding the total for 2025. The UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which monitors abuse material globally, assessed 6,310 AI images that met the legal definition of child sexual abuse in the first half of 2026.
This figure is 40% higher than last year’s total of more than 4,500. Analysts at the IWF found more photorealistic child sexual abuse material in the first half of 2026 than for the entirety of the prior year. The majority of the images seen by analysts were of girls, and of children aged seven to 13.
The IWF has stated that these figures underscore the need for new statutory regulation on AI. Hannah Swirsky, the head of policy at the IWF, supports calls for binding legislation on AI to compel companies to build safer models, stating that it is incumbent on tech companies to build tools that cannot be abused.
UK law makes AI-generated child sexual abuse material illegal. The government has also banned adapting an AI model to create abuse material or distributing such models. Developing a model designed to produce hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material carries a criminal sentence of up to five years.
A government spokesperson affirmed that UK law is clear on the illegality of child sexual abuse material, regardless of its AI generation. They added that the government is going further by banning AI models used to create this type of abuse material and produce hyper-realistic imagery, which often contains the likeness of real 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. This number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397.