Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps she is taking to ensure AI tools are safe by design to prevent the creation of child sexual abuse material.

The government is committed to tackling the creation of this atrocious material. Creating, possessing, or distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including AI Generated CSAM, is illegal. The Online Safety Act requires services to proactively identify and remove this content.

We are taking further action in the Crime and Policing Bill to criminalise CSAM image generators, and to ensure AI developers can directly test for and address vulnerabilities in their models which enable the production of CSAM.

The Government is clear: no option is off the table when it comes to protecting the online safety of users in the UK, and we will not hesitate to act where evidence suggests that further action is necessary.