Children will be better protected from becoming victims of horrific indecent deepfakes as new laws aim to ensure AI cannot be exploited to generate child sexual abuse material.

Data from the Internet Watch Foundation released today shows reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material have more than doubled in the past year, rising from 199 in 2024 to 426 in 2025.

There has also been a disturbing rise in depictions of infants, with images of 0–2-year-olds surging from 5 in 2024 to 92 in 2025.

Under stringent new legislation, designated bodies like AI developers and child protection organisations, such as the IWF, will be empowered to scrutinise AI models and ensure safeguards are in place to prevent them generating or proliferating child sexual abuse material.

Currently, criminal liability to create and possess this material means developers can’t carry out safety testing on AI models, and images can only be removed after they have been created and shared online. This measure, said to be one of the first of its kind in the world, ensures AI systems’ safeguards can be robustly tested from the start, to limit its production in the first place.

The laws will also enable organisations to check models have protections against extreme pornography, and non-consensual intimate images.