The NCA and IWF say criminals are harvesting everyday images, with AI-generated abuse videos jumping from 13 to 3,440 in a single year
Parents should stop publicly posting images of their children online because of the growth of AI-generated abuse imagery, the UK’s National Crime Agency has warned . The agency issued the advice alongside the Internet Watch Foundation, the charity responsible for finding and removing child sexual abuse material online.
The IWF identified 8,029 AI-generated images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse in 2025, a 14% rise on the year before. Video is where the growth is starkest, up from just 13 confirmed AI-generated abuse videos in 2024 to 3,440 last year.
Such imagery is treated as child sexual abuse material under UK law, regardless of how it was made. “While we and policing colleagues tackle offenders, prevention remains vital,” said Tim Wright, a senior manager at the NCA.
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Warnings about “sharenting”, a term that entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2016, have circulated for years over identity theft and privacy. AI tools that can convincingly manipulate photos have turned an old worry into something sharper.
The IWF has previously reported a case in which a criminal gang scraped pupils’ photos from a school website and used AI to create more than 100 sexual images of the children. Its data also shows the harm is heavily gendered, with 98% of confirmed AI abuse imagery in 2024 involving girls where sex was recorded.
Children themselves are alert to the threat, with UNICEF research finding a quarter of children fear their images being turned into explicit deepfakes . Campaigners have long pushed for stronger European tools against nonconsensual deepfake imagery .
The UK government has moved to ban so-called nudification apps and adjusted the law so AI firms can test whether their systems can be abused to produce such material. The IWF, which campaigned for the ban, has described the apps as products with no reason to exist.
Ofcom is meanwhile enforcing the Online Safety Act, opening a child safety investigation into Telegram after probes of X and Grok. Ministers are also weighing an under-16 social media ban .
The wider deepfake reckoning, from celebrities to schoolchildren , has already forced lawmakers to move faster than they planned. The NCA guidance shifts some of that urgency to the family photo album.
“These are not hypothetical threats, they are real,” said IWF chief executive Kerry Smith, stressing that the aim is informed sharing with trusted people rather than no sharing at all. The advice, in the end, is less about panic than about shrinking the pool of raw material.
I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, (show all) I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe ecosystem, with an eye on the larger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how Europe is learning to speak in a louder voice of its own. Before moving into senior editorial leadership, I've built my career for over +10 years across journalism, storytelling, content strategy, SEO, and digital publishing, with experience in SaaS, hospitality, art, and culture.