German report warns AI is increasingly used in child sexual abuse

German authorities warned on Tuesday that artificial intelligence and digital technology are playing a growing role in the sexual abuse of children, with criminal abusers increasingly using those tools.

Holger Muench, head of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, said sexual abuse of minors is increasingly moving into the digital realm and pushing overall statistics upward.

A BKA report released Tuesday said 20,051 minors were victims of sexual abuse in Germany in 2025, compared with 19,344 in 2024. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called the number alarmingly high and said reported statistics did not include a large volume of unreported cases that could be significantly higher.

Muench said two worrying trends were emerging. One is a rise in cyber-grooming, in which minors are targeted and trust is deliberately built to facilitate sexual abuse. Another is an increase in reports of people watching the abuse of children in real time through online livestreaming.

Muench said livestreaming cases rose from 25 in 2024 to more than 250 in 2026. He said much of the livestreamed abuse appears to take place abroad, with the Philippines an apparent hotspot. He added that authorities had evidence that about 40 percent of offenders who access these livestreams travel to those locations to commit abuse.

Kerstin Claus, the German government's commissioner for combating child abuse, said widely available AI has helped facilitate cyber-grooming by allowing abusers to create fake identities more easily and simulate friendship and closeness in chats.

Muench said the spread of AI-generated child sexual abuse material had not affected the number of real children being abused, but had created problems for investigators, who must process much larger volumes of material and quickly determine what is real and what is not.

He said AI manipulation can also be used to create sexually abusive material from seemingly harmless images. He said this victimises children and may be contributing to a rise in sextortion of children, in which intimate photos or videos are used for blackmail.

Claus said global surveys have estimated that 11 percent of all children and adolescents worldwide have been victims of sextortion.

Dobrindt said German lawmakers are expected to require internet service providers to retain IP addresses for three months to better combat online child abuse and other forms of cybercrime. He said a parliamentary vote is expected in the autumn.