A UK service called Report Remove, run by the Internet Watch Foundation and the NSPCC, lets children flag intimate images of themselves so tech platforms can block them. In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports of faked or manipulated explicit images, more than the entire 397 reports it got in all of 2025.
The reason is simple. Nudification apps now let anyone take an ordinary photo and turn it into a fake nude image in seconds. A child does not need to do anything risky online.
A normal photo posted by a parent, a school, or the child themselves is enough raw material to create abuse material that is illegal to make or share in the UK. That is what makes this so hard to stop: the child did nothing wrong, and the photo that got misused may have looked completely harmless.
This is not a small or local problem. In the United States, reports of AI-made child abuse images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children went from 4,700 in 2023 to more than 400,000 in the first half of 2025 alone. Separate research tracking video content found a 260 times increase in AI-generated abuse videos over the same period.
Governments are racing to catch up, but not in the same direction. The UK is preparing a law that would make it a crime to build or supply a nudification tool at all, not just to misuse one. That shifts the target from the person who made the fake image to the company that built the app in the first place.
The US is taking a messier path. San Francisco's city attorney has ordered Apple and Google to pull nudify apps from their stores or face fines, and California increased civil penalties for companies that help create or spread this material. But Elon Musk's company xAI is now suing Minnesota over its own ban, arguing it should not be held responsible for how its tools get misused.
Expect this fight over who is liable, the app maker, the app store, or the platform hosting the image, to keep playing out differently in every country and even every state for some time. For most businesses, the direct exposure looks small, but it is not zero.
Schools have already been targeted by criminals who scrape ordinary class photos, turn them into fake abuse material, and demand payment to keep it from being published. Any organization that posts identifiable photos of children, camps, sports clubs, family-focused retailers, tour operators, is sitting on the same raw material.
The practical move here is not complicated. Review what photos of minors are public on your website and social accounts, tighten who can see them, and ask your insurer whether cyber and extortion coverage actually accounts for this kind of blackmail. Most existing coverage was written with hacking in mind, not a criminal turning a class photo into leverage, and that gap will not close on its own.