UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner Warns AI Is Scaling Child Exploitation as US Reports Explode
Updated
Britain’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner has issued a direct warning that artificial intelligence is enabling criminal gangs to exploit children at a greater scale and speed than ever before. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Eleanor Lyons described how AI-generated fake profiles mimicking young people are being used to groom and recruit British children into carrying drugs, laundering money, and other criminal activity. Recent data also shows an increase in identified child trafficking cases in the UK, with 60% involving UK nationals.
7,045 children were referred as potential victims of trafficking and modern slavery in 2025, according to figures from the National Referral Mechanism. That is a 17% increase over 2024. Lyons and the children’s charity ECPAT UK released a report earlier this month that said there were more than 30,000 assessment episodes involving trafficking, criminal exploitation, or sexual exploitation in the year ending March 2025. In 2025, there were only 34 completed prosecutions in England and Wales involving cses flagged for both modern slavery or trafficking and child abuse. There were only 17 convictions, a 55% decline from the 38 convictions in 2024.
Lyons told The Independent that criminals are using AI “to make their jobs easier to reach more people at scale, at speed, and a broader cohort.” Fake profiles are created and managed by AI, and they’re becoming increasingly more difficult to identify as fake. When a child is successfully contacted, they are asked to receive a small amount of money into a bank account and withdraw it the next day. Amounts grow over time. Some of the children are later coerced into carrying drugs or committing violence.
The commissioner said the target profile victim has changed significantly over the last six or seven years. Previously the highest-risk groups were children who were in care homes, went missing, or lacked support structures. Now, gangs are increasingly targeting children from stable, loving families who attend good schools. “Sometimes criminals are using those children to carry because they are beyond the reach of where local authorities or law enforcement would think to look,” Lyons said.
The report and the interview include details about other tactics used by criminal ganges, including AI-generated scripts to pressure children into recruiting others and AI-generated child sexual abuse material used to blackmail and target victims. Sextortion rates among children under 18 are increasing.
Lyons is calling for a dedicated cross-government child exploitation strategy focused on prevention and measures to identify and hold perpetrators accountable when victims are identified. She said tech companies are not fully complying with the Online Safety Act and the government should take stronger action to hold these companies accountable.
The United States has seen a substantial increase in child exploitation through the use of generative AI in the last three years. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 4,700 CyberTipline reports in 2023, 67,000 in 2024, and more than 400,000 in 2025. The center notes there were an additional 200,000 reports in 2025 involving a generative AI “nexus,” but they didn’t have enough information to know exactly how it was being used to exploit a child.
More than 145,000 of the reports in 2025 were using GAI to modify existing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to create new files. This revictimizes children who were exploited to create the original CSAM that is being altered by GAI. Over 30,000 involved the creation of new CSAM with GAI by uploading a file and text prompts. The CyberTipline received a total of 21.3 million reports of child exploitation in 2025 with approximately 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.
NCMEC identified more than 275 direct victims of GAI CSAM in 2024 and 2025. The majority of the offenders were individuals who have direct access to the child, but the technology is also being used by strangers in sextortion operations.
GAI isn’t the only way that child exploitation has increased over the past decade. The HighWire reported last year about the gaming platform Roblox, which can facilitate connections between predators and the children who make up the majority of the clientele on the platform. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed a lawsuit against Roblox alleging “the facilitation and distribution of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”) and sexual exploitation of Louisiana’s minor children.”
Criminals and predators do not need to utilize GAI to exploit children through Roblox, but in many cases they do. Predators can download images of children from the platform and use GAI to create CSAM images. Then, they use those images as sextortion to blackmail and manipulate the child victims.
Child victims who are sextorted online have committed suicide in many cases. This happens after predators threaten to send the explicit images to friends or family without complying with further requests, which may include self-harm, sending money, or sending more explicit images.
A January 2026 Department of Homeland Security bulletin said the online recruitment of children for sex trafficking is becoming an endemic problem. Traffickers use social media, gaming platforms, encrypted messaging, dating apps, and AI to identify and manipulate child victims. One perpetrator used AI to extort 68 minors and trafficked at least five of them.
In both the UK and the US, the rapid expansion of AI technology is outpacing the safeguards to protect children from exploitation. AI makes it easier for criminals to create convincing fake profiles, generate explicit content, and make contact with a larger number of potential victims.
A 2026 report from Common Sense Media shows tweens (age 9-12) spend a median time of one hour 49 minutes on gaming platforms and one hour 25 minutes on social media while teens spend a median of two hours for each activity. Tweens spend five hours of time per day online while teenagers spend over eight hours per day on the internet.