Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps her Department is taking to tackle deepfakes online.

The Online Safety Act requires services to tackle illegal content and protect children from harmful content, including where it is AI generated ‘deepfakes’.

Building on this, the offence of creating intimate images without consent, including using AI, will come into effect in the coming weeks and this will be made a priority offence under the Act, giving users the strongest protections from such content. We are also criminalising nudification apps – making it illegal for companies to supply such tools.

We are also running Deepfake Detection Challenge 2026 a programme aimed at strengthening capabilities to detect and mitigate synthetic media threats.