Child sexual abuse imagery generated by artificial intelligence tools is becoming more prevalent on the open web and reaching a "tipping point", according to a safety watchdog. The Internet Watch Foundation said the amount of AI-made illegal content it had seen online over the past six months had already exceeded the total for the previous year. The organisation, which runs a UK hotline but also has a global remit, said almost all the content was found on publicly available areas of the internet and not on the dark web, which must be accessed by specialised browsers. The IWF's interim chief executive, Derek Ray-Hill, said the level of sophistication in the images indicated that the AI tools used had been trained on images and videos of real victims. "Recent months show that this problem is not going away and is in fact getting worse," he said.

Last week, Apple announced two backdoors in the US into the encryption that protects its devices. One will monitor iMessages: if any photos sent by or to under-13s seem to contain nudity, the user may be challenged and their parents may be informed. The second will see Apple scan all the images on a phone's camera roll and if they're similar to known sex-abuse images flag them as suspect. If enough suspect images are backed up to an iCloud account, they'll be decrypted and inspected. If Apple thinks they're illegal, the user will be reported to the relevant authorities. Action on the circulation of child sexual abuse imagery is long overdue.