UK children reported 420 AI-faked explicit images of themselves in just six months
AI nudification tools are making it easier to fake sexual images of real children, and the UK's main reporting service says cases have already beaten 2025's full-year total.
What happened: Report Remove, a UK service run by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and the NSPCC, says children flagged 420 images of themselves in the first six months of this year that they believe were digitally faked to look sexually explicit. That already exceeds the 397 reports made in all of 2025. The service, which lets under-18s anonymously flag intimate images so platforms can remove or block them, had to add a checkbox specifically for 'deepfaked' content after seeing so many reports come in. IWF chief technology officer Dan Sexton says the jump confirms an early fear: that AI tools would be used to turn ordinary photos of real children into abuse material.
Why it matters: Most of the manipulated images reported in 2025 and 2026 were severe enough to legally count as child sexual abuse material, which is illegal in the UK whether or not the image is 'real'. Sexton says any child with a photo online is a potential target, and once a fake image exists, there is little they can do to stop it. Some children who contacted Report Remove had also been targeted for sextortion, where someone threatens to publish or share the fake images unless the child pays money or sends more explicit material.
How this is happening: Widely available nudification apps and general AI image generators can take an ordinary, fully clothed photo, the kind posted on social media or a school website, and turn it into a fake explicit image within moments, with no technical skill required. The NSPCC's Rani Govender calls the rise sadly predictable as this technology has spread. Report Remove fights back differently: it turns a reported image into a unique digital fingerprint, or hash, shared with major platforms so they can detect and block copies before they are ever uploaded.
What's being done: UK law already bans AI-generated child sexual abuse material, and the government has gone further, criminalising the adaptation of AI models to create abuse material or the distribution of such models. The National Crime Agency and IWF now urge parents to make children's accounts private or share photos only within closed close-friends groups, after criminals were found scraping school website images to build fake abuse material and blackmail schools. Schools are being told to remove identifiable pupil photos from public pages, while the NSPCC pushes AI firms to block this kind of generation at the source.