The UK's Report Remove service receives 420 reports from under-18s of explicit images digitally faked or manipulated to depict them in H1, exceeding 2025's 397
Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or ‘nudified’ content easier to produce
Context & Ripple Effects
The Report Remove figures add a victim-reporting measure to a pattern already visible in the Internet Watch Foundation’s detection work: it identified 8,029 AI-generated realistic child-abuse images and videos in 2025, after warning in 2023 that generative AI was being used to create unlawful abuse imagery.
The UK had already proposed a prohibition on creating non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes, while related coverage found international rules for explicit AI deepfakes were largely untested. The new reports show the issue is reaching under-18s directly, not solely appearing in watchdog scans.
First-order effects
- Report Remove must handle 420 under-18 reports in six months—more than it received across 2025—of explicit images manipulated to depict the reporter.
- Young people reporting to the service are confronting a faster-growing supply of sexualised or “nudified” material enabled by AI tools.
Second-order effects
- The report volume gives UK policymakers a more direct measure of harm alongside the Internet Watch Foundation’s detection counts, increasing pressure to make the proposed deepfake prohibition operational.
- Watchdogs and reporting services will need to reconcile victim reports with the expanding volume of AI-generated abuse imagery already identified in their monitoring.
Third-order effects
- If reporting and detection continue rising together, online child-safety enforcement will increasingly have to address synthetic depictions as a distinct abuse category rather than treat image authenticity as the central threshold.
- The pattern points toward a safety regime in which accessible image-generation tools shift demand from detecting rare manipulated media to managing high-volume reporting, removal, and legal accountability.
The trend: Generative AI is lowering the barrier to producing sexualised synthetic imagery, moving the policy challenge from isolated deepfake incidents toward scalable child-safety enforcement.