The Internet Watch Foundation identified 1,286 AI-generated videos of child sexual abuse in H1 2025 globally, up from just two in H1 2024
Organizations that track the material are reporting a surge in A.I. images and videos, which are threatening to overwhelm law enforcement.
Context & Ripple Effects
The finding extends an alarm the Internet Watch Foundation raised in 2023 about generative AI being used to create illegal abuse imagery. A 2024 assessment had already warned that synthetic material could overrun the CyberTipline reporting system, making the move from isolated video detections to a large identified volume operationally significant.
Later IWF reporting of 8,029 realistic AI-generated abuse images and videos identified in 2025 suggests this was part of a widening enforcement problem, not simply a one-off spike in one format.
First-order effects
- The Internet Watch Foundation and law-enforcement partners must triage a far larger volume of AI-generated video evidence, adding pressure to already constrained identification, reporting, and victim-safeguarding workflows.
- The reported increase makes AI-generated video a more immediate moderation and detection concern for services that receive, host, or are used to distribute illegal material.
Second-order effects
- Detection systems and reporting pipelines will need to distinguish synthetic material while preserving escalation paths for content that may indicate real-world abuse; added volume can slow review across both categories.
- The surge raises the cost of safety operations for AI-tool providers and online platforms, increasing pressure for abuse-prevention controls and cooperation with specialist watchdogs.
Third-order effects
- If synthetic abuse content continues to scale faster than specialist review capacity, child-safety enforcement may shift toward more automated prioritization and shared detection infrastructure, with difficult accuracy and accountability trade-offs.
- This strengthens the case for AI governance that treats harmful-content generation as a public-safety and enforcement-capacity problem, rather than only a platform-moderation issue.
The trend: Generative AI is expanding the enforcement surface for child-safety systems by making harmful synthetic media cheaper to produce and harder to triage at scale.