Our Mission & Strategy

The Safe AI for Children Alliance (SAIFCA) is dedicated to protecting children from the urgent risks posed by AI while also working to create a brighter future for them.

Our mission is to protect children from the risks posed by artificial intelligence - both today and as increasingly powerful AI systems shape the world they will inherit.

Children need protection from AI-related harm now, opportunities to develop through human relationships and real-world experience, and a future in which powerful technologies remain subject to meaningful human control.

Our strategy brings these responsibilities together through practical guidance, policy development, public awareness, campaigning, and collaboration.

The change we are working towards

We want children’s safety, rights, and developmental needs to shape decisions about AI from the outset.

Parents, carers, educators, and other professionals need clear information to help them protect children within the world as it currently exists. However, responsibility cannot rest primarily with families and schools. Those developing, deploying, and distributing AI systems must be required to prevent harm, and governments must establish and enforce appropriate boundaries.

This responsibility also extends beyond the products children use today. Children will live for longer than today’s adults with the social, economic, political, and security consequences of decisions being made about increasingly powerful AI. Their interests must be represented in the governance of this development and in efforts to ensure that humanity retains meaningful control over the technologies it creates.

The future cannot be predicted with certainty. This makes it important to distinguish between harms already occurring and longer-term risks whose likelihood or timing remains uncertain. It does not remove the responsibility to act before every serious potential harm has materialised.

Our current priorities

1. Advancing the Three Non-Negotiables

Our Non-Negotiables campaign calls for three minimum protections:

AI systems must never create or facilitate sexualised images of children.
AI systems must never cultivate, exploit, or sustain emotional dependency in children.
AI systems must never encourage or facilitate children to harm themselves or others.

Our priority is to build understanding and support for these protections, and to contribute to their translation into enforceable requirements.

Our Three Non-Negotiables policy framework addresses the powerful underlying models on which many products depend, alongside product design, deployment, access, and accountability. It is intended to inform policy discussions and support the further legal and technical work needed to turn these principles into effective protections.

2. Keeping practical guidance accessible and current

Rapid changes in AI create difficult decisions for families, schools, and safeguarding professionals. We will continue developing and updating free guidance that explains emerging risks clearly and provides practical steps people can take.

This includes our full guide to AI risks to children, our quick guide for parents and carers, and resources addressing specific technologies and concerns.

We prioritise issues where the potential harm is serious, public understanding is limited, or accessible guidance can help people respond. Supporting families and professionals is essential while stronger protections are developed, but it cannot compensate for unsafe products or replace responsibility from technology providers and governments.

3. Developing Keep Childhood Human

Our developing Keep Childhood Human campaign focuses on protecting the human experiences through which children learn, form relationships, and develop their own capacities.

The campaign asks which aspects of childhood must remain fully human as AI becomes more present in education, entertainment, and everyday life. Its focus includes friendship, play, creativity, independent thought, boredom, trusted adults, real-world experience, and learning to navigate disagreement, difficulty, and mistakes.

SAIFCA has gathered input from developmental psychologists and child-safety professionals in different parts of the world. Our priority is to develop a clear and accessible campaign, informed by relevant expertise, with practical ways for families, professionals, and organisations to support its aims.

4. Bringing children’s interests into decisions about advanced AI

Children’s futures are affected by decisions that extend well beyond products marketed to them. Increasingly powerful AI could reshape employment, public institutions, democratic agency, security, and society’s ability to govern its own technologies.

Our work on the international AI arms race examines how commercial and geopolitical competition can encourage speed at the expense of safety. We support stronger governance of advanced AI, including independent evaluation, enforceable boundaries, effective regulatory powers, and international cooperation to reduce the pressure to race.

Where serious risks cannot be adequately assessed or controlled, governments must be able to restrict, delay, or pause the relevant development or deployment. We will continue making the case that children’s long-term interests belong within these decisions, alongside urgent action against harms already occurring.

Building on our work so far

Since SAIFCA was founded at the end of 2024, we have worked to establish children’s AI safety as an issue requiring both practical safeguarding and wider governance.

Our work so far has included:

Publishing free guidance for parents, carers, schools, and other professionals on the main AI risks affecting children.
Developing the Three Non-Negotiables from a public campaign into a more comprehensive policy framework.
Publishing early guidance encouraging schools to move away from using identifiable photographs of children on public-facing websites and social media.
Contributing to discussions about children’s AI safety in UK Parliament and at international forums, including IASEAI’s 2026 conference at UNESCO in Paris.
Becoming an official affiliate of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI.
Supporting international initiatives including the Global Call for AI Red Lines.

These are foundations on which we intend to build. Our next stage is focused on strengthening the reach and practical use of our guidance, advancing our policy work, developing Keep Childhood Human, and building the organisational capacity needed to sustain this work.

How we work towards change

Accessible information helps families and professionals recognise risks and make better-informed decisions. Public communication helps emerging concerns receive wider attention, while policy proposals give decision-makers and advocates a more concrete basis for pursuing stronger protections.

We connect these activities through engagement with policymakers and collaboration across AI safety, child protection, education, law, and governance. This helps bring children’s development and everyday experiences into technical and policy discussions, while ensuring that practical safeguarding advice reflects changes in AI capabilities.

We also create ways for people and organisations to contribute. Sharing guidance, supporting campaigns, contributing relevant expertise, and raising these issues with decision-makers can all help extend the reach of the work and increase pressure for protective action.

How we set priorities and assess progress

SAIFCA works in a rapidly changing field where the number of issues requiring attention is greater than the capacity of any one organisation. We focus our resources where the risks to children are substantial and where our combination of guidance, public communication, policy development, and convening can make a useful contribution.

When setting priorities, we consider:

The seriousness and urgency of the potential harm.
The quality and extent of the available evidence.
The number and vulnerability of the children who could be affected.
Gaps in existing public understanding, guidance, policy, or protection.
Whether early action could prevent harm from becoming more widespread.
Whether SAIFCA has a distinctive and useful contribution to make.

We assess progress through evidence that our work is being found, used, shared, cited, or taken into substantive discussion. This can include guidance informing decisions by families and professionals, resources contributing to safeguarding practice, campaigns attracting meaningful support, and policy proposals being considered by relevant decision-makers.

Building a sustainable organisation

SAIFCA remains independent of technology company funding. Our positions and priorities are guided by evidence, children’s interests, and our mission, and we will not accept funding conditions that compromise our ability to speak or act independently.

Sustaining this work requires reliable funding for the people, time, and organisational capacity behind it. This includes keeping guidance freely available and up to date, developing policy proposals, coordinating expert contributions, supporting campaigns, responding to emerging risks, and maintaining the infrastructure through which the work reaches others.

Building sustainable capacity will allow SAIFCA to protect what already exists, respond more consistently, and develop from a founder-led initiative into a durable organisation capable of delivering long-term public benefit.

We welcome support from individuals, trusts, foundations, and other funders who share our commitment to protecting children through independent work in the public interest.

To discuss funding or collaboration, please contact info@safeaiforchildren.org.

For more about SAIFCA’s track record, people, and organisational structure, visit About the Safe AI for Children Alliance. You can also subscribe for new guidance, campaign developments, and opportunities to contribute.