Bitcoin

This data point is the latest in a series of child safety and deepfake scandals that are forcing governments to act. The EU AI Act, UK Online Safety Act, and proposed US federal AI rules already target illegal content generation. The IWF figure provides hard evidence that voluntary guardrails are failing, which will accelerate mandatory content provenance (e.g., C2PA) and KYC for AI platforms. This regulatory wave will likely spill over into decentralized AI and crypto projects that lack centralized compliance controls.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) assessed 6,310 AI-generated images meeting the legal definition of CSAM in H1 2026, a 40% increase over the 4,500+ images assessed in all of 2025.