Analysts at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) identified more photorealistic AI-generated child sexual abuse images in the first six months of 2026 than throughout all of 2025, including imagery showing children under two years old. The IWF, Europe's largest hotline working globally to locate, assess and halt child sexual abuse imagery and videos online, released the findings alongside an urgent call for EU policymakers to finalize long-stalled legislation. The proposed rules would provide tech companies with lasting legal certainty to find and remove criminal child sexual abuse content on their platforms.
Between January 1 and June 30 this year, IWF analysts assessed 6,310 AI-generated images meeting the legal definition of child sexual abuse—40% more than the 4,512 images recorded during the entirety of 2025. Among images where both age and gender were documented (6,221 total), girls appeared in 98% of AI-generated imagery identified during the first half of 2026. The number of unique images depicting girls climbed substantially from 4,259 across all of 2025 to 6,094 by the end of June this year. The data also reveals a rise in AI sexual abuse imagery showing younger children: analysts identified 2,534 images depicting children aged seven to 10, 2,369 images showing children aged 11 to 13, 1,004 images depicting children aged three to six, and 190 images showing infants and toddlers under age two. Imagery depicting children aged seven to 13 accounted for 79% of AI-generated images identified in the first half of 2026, up from 70% across all of 2025.
The IWF states that AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery causes real harm, noting that in some cases offenders use AI tools to manipulate genuine images of victims, creating new abuse material that can further traumatize survivors. The organization works to disrupt the spread of this content by converting confirmed criminal images into unique digital fingerprints known as "hashes," which can be shared with law enforcement and technology companies to automatically detect and block known child sexual abuse imagery without storing or viewing the original images. According to the report, the proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation represents "a real opportunity" to close the gaps where services aren't already detecting and removing child sexual abuse material.
While hash-matching serves as a vital tool, the report explains it can only stop abuse content that has already been identified. The growth of AI-generated child sexual abuse material shows why EU child protection legislation must enable the detection of both known and previously unseen content, the IWF says. New criminal content has no existing hash because it must first be identified before it can be given a hash and prevented from spreading. A legal framework that focuses only on known material would leave the door open for offenders to rapidly create and spread high volumes of new AI material.
The report warns that online child sexual abuse has evolved significantly since the legislation was first proposed in 2022, and the EU needs a framework that can meaningfully respond to the scale of the challenge. Without action, offenders will continue exploiting AI tools to produce and distribute new abuse imagery faster than existing detection methods can catch it.