AI child sex abuse images rise sharply, says IWF

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has said its analysts have seen a massive increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material this year.

Its head of hotline Ngaire Alexander said this material tends to be at the more severe end of the scale because "people can create whatever they want".

The charity, based in Histon, Cambridgeshire, reported 300,000 instances of child sexual abuse online last year.

"We're also seeing people paying for the tools or paying other people to create the content they want to see... which is really, really alarming," said Alexander, a former police officer.

"We speak at the IWF a lot about the need for technology companies to take responsibility for building safety by design into their tools to prevent exactly this."

The charity, which aims to remove child sexual abuse material from the internet, tends to see year-on-year growth, she told BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's Dotty McLeod.

She said the number of reported instances of child sexual abuse online had already "exceeded" last year's total.

Earlier this month, it said it found more photorealistic AI-generated child sexual abuse images in the first half of this year than in the whole of 2025, including images of children under two.

Such material "normalises abuse", said Alexander, while images created on real people or on existing victims "just continue that cycle of trauma for those victims, so it's incredibly harmful".

"I can't even call AI an emerging threat anymore; it is a stabilised threat in this space," she added.

"The law is really clear that AI-generated child sexual abuse material is illegal."

To help it cope with this growth, it is recruiting two additional office-based internet content analyst roles.

People can report suspected child sexual abuse material to its hotline, and the analysts assess the legality and severity of that material.

Alexander said: "It is a really difficult job; the material that we see in the hotline and that the analysts and image assessors look at every single day is really challenging, triggering, stressful, upsetting - it's images and videos of children being abused.

"We need people who are resilient enough to handle this type of content and this type of work, but we put lots and lots of measures in place to protect our workforce and support them in what they do."

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