European Commission publishes guidance on AI-generated child sexual abuse material under Digital Services Act

The European Commission released formal guidance on 4 September 2024 confirming that artificially generated and digitally manipulated images depicting child sexual abuse fall within the scope of illegal content under the Digital Services Act, obliging Very Large Online Platforms and search engines to detect, remove and report such material. The guidance responds to mounting evidence from law enforcement and child-protection organisations that generative AI systems are being exploited to produce synthetic abuse imagery, including deepfakes created from non-sexual photographs of real children, and that this content is proliferating across hosting and messaging services.

Synthetic and AI-manipulated abuse material circulates through the same private-messaging and file-sharing channels as photographed content, and its distribution often involves the same grooming, coercion and sextortion tactics documented in traditional cases. Anti-CSAM detection that recognises both the material itself—whether photographed or generated—and the predatory context in which it is solicited or shared provides a mechanism to interdict the harm in real time. Guardii's CSAM detection module, integrated across Instagram, Discord, Snapchat and other direct-messaging environments, identifies the exchange of illegal imagery as it occurs, flagging the conversation and enabling immediate reporting to platform trust-and-safety teams and to law enforcement, addressing both legacy and emerging forms of abuse with a unified detection framework.