Our Mission

SAIFCA works to protect children’s safety, rights, and wellbeing as AI develops. Our mission brings together practical guidance and advocacy for enforceable protections against present-day harms and wider risks to children’s futures.

Our mission is to protect children’s safety, rights, and wellbeing as AI develops, through action on the harms they face today and the decisions shaping their future.

Children need protection from unsafe AI products and harmful uses of the technology, alongside safe environments and human relationships that support their development. Their wellbeing also depends on reliable essential services and a society able to govern powerful technologies in the public interest.

The Safe AI for Children Alliance (SAIFCA) works towards these protections through practical guidance, public communication, campaigning, and policy advocacy. Our work addresses products children use, systems that affect them through other people’s actions or decisions, and the wider consequences of increasingly powerful AI.

What we're working towards

We want children’s safety and rights to shape decisions about AI from the outset, with enforceable requirements that prevent harm and hold those responsible to account.

Families, schools, and other professionals need clear information to help them protect children. However, they cannot be expected to compensate for unsafe technologies or manage risks beyond their control. Governments must establish and enforce appropriate boundaries, and those developing and providing AI systems must take responsibility for the harms their systems can cause.

Protecting children also means safeguarding the human experiences through which they develop. Children need opportunities to build relationships, think independently, and learn through play and real-world experience. Decisions about introducing AI into their lives should respect these needs.

Our responsibility extends to risks affecting the wider world in which children grow up, including potentially catastrophic harm from advanced AI. We support proportionate preventive action, with enforceable restrictions where credible catastrophic risks cannot be adequately assessed or controlled.

How we contribute

Helping families and professionals protect children

SAIFCA publishes free, accessible guidance for parents, carers, educators, and others working with children. We explain emerging risks and offer practical steps people can take, while making clear where stronger action from governments and technology providers is needed.

Our resource hub brings together guidance on issues including AI companions, sexualised images, privacy, and the use of AI in education.

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.

We work to build support for these protections and their translation into enforceable requirements. Our policy framework sets out proposals covering AI development and the products children use, including the evidence providers should supply and the powers authorities need to intervene.

Keeping childhood human

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

It asks how we can preserve space for friendship, creativity, and independent thought as AI becomes more present in everyday life. This includes recognising the value of trusted adults and allowing children to experience boredom, disagreement, and mistakes without automatically turning to an AI system.

Advocating for effective controls on advanced AI

Children’s safety also depends on the wider systems that support their lives, including healthcare and other essential services. Decisions about advanced AI can affect these foundations and have lasting consequences for the society in which children grow up.

SAIFCA advocates for independent scrutiny, effective regulatory powers, and international cooperation to prevent severe harm. Where credible catastrophic risks cannot be adequately assessed or controlled, the relevant development or deployment should not proceed.

We support international work to establish enforceable red lines around catastrophic AI risks, including dangerous capabilities relating to cyber attacks, biological and other CBRN threats, and loss of human control. Technical thresholds and evaluation methods require specialist expertise, and our role is to complement that work by helping establish why these risks are also relevant to children’s protection and building understanding and support beyond the specialist AI safety community.

Our public statement supports A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models and brings together expertise from advanced AI safety and governance with children’s safety, rights, education, and development. We are building on that foundation through focused engagement with specialists developing red lines and organisations responsible for children’s safety and rights.

Our policy brief sets out the protections we support. You can also read why catastrophic risks fall within our work on children’s safety and wellbeing, and our wider assessment of advanced AI.

An approach guided by evidence and children’s interests

We distinguish between harms already occurring and potential risks for which the likelihood or timing is uncertain. We explain the limits of the evidence and revise our assessments when relevant findings emerge, while recognising that preventive action can be necessary before uncertainty is fully resolved.

We draw on expertise across child development, safeguarding, and AI research, alongside law and public policy. We seek to make this knowledge accessible and help it inform decisions about protection.

Children’s perspectives should also be heard in ways appropriate to their age and circumstances. Responsibility for addressing these risks remains with adults and the institutions able to act.

As a small organisation, we concentrate our capacity where our work can make a useful contribution.

Addressing present-day harms and preventing wider risks to children’s futures are both integral to our mission, with priorities informed by the evidence, urgency, and opportunities to prevent harm.

Independence and support

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

Reliable support enables us to keep guidance freely available and sustain the research, communication, and policy engagement behind our work. We welcome contact from individuals, organisations, and funders who share our commitment to protecting children.

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

You can read more about SAIFCA and our current strategy.