September 2026

SAIFCA works to protect children from AI-related harm through practical guidance and advocacy for effective, enforceable protections. Our strategy connects the needs and experiences of children with the decisions made by governments, technology providers, and other institutions responsible for their safety.

Our immediate priorities are advancing the Three Non-Negotiables and building support for effective controls on frontier AI. We also aim to develop Keep Childhood Human further as capacity and resources allow. Free guidance for families and professionals remains an essential part of our work across these priorities.

How we work towards change

Clear information helps people recognise risks and respond to them. Public communication can also build support for protective action and bring concerns to the attention of those able to act.

Our policy work develops these concerns into proposals that governments, regulators, and other organisations can examine and take forward. We seek to connect relevant expertise with opportunities to influence decisions, concentrating on work that can contribute to stronger protection.

Practical guidance and policy advocacy support one another. The experiences of families and professionals can reveal gaps in protection, while understanding how AI is developed and governed helps us explain where responsibility lies beyond individual users.

Our current priorities

1. Advancing the Three Non-Negotiables

The Three Non-Negotiables call for minimum protections that every child should be guaranteed:

• 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 support for these protections and contribute to their translation into enforceable requirements.

The policy framework provides a basis for this work. It addresses the products children encounter and the underlying models, with proposals for evidence requirements, independent scrutiny, and intervention where safeguards are inadequate.

We will concentrate on bringing the framework into relevant policy discussions and helping organisations and professionals use it to assess proposed protections. This includes examining whether laws and company commitments address the harms themselves, place responsibility on the appropriate parties, and provide effective means of enforcement.

2. Advancing protection through frontier AI governance

Children’s safety depends on the wider conditions in which they live, including functioning healthcare and other essential services. Decisions about increasingly powerful AI systems can affect those conditions, with some risks involving severe and potentially irreversible harm.

SAIFCA’s objective is to help build support for effective frontier AI controls that protect children, and to ensure that their rights and developmental needs inform the safeguards adopted.

Our public statement supports A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models and calls for children’s rights, safety, and long-term interests to be central to taking its proposals forward.

The next stage is to use that support to seek substantive engagement with policymakers and those developing the international proposals. We want to identify specific decisions where SAIFCA can contribute, including through explaining the consequences for children and bringing relevant expertise into the discussion.

Our work in this area supports independent evaluation, effective regulatory powers, and international cooperation. Where credible catastrophic risks cannot be adequately assessed or controlled, we advocate enforceable restrictions on the relevant development or deployment.

Our analysis of the AI arms race examines the pressures that can undermine safety and the options for addressing them. Our assessment of catastrophic risks explains the reasoning behind our position.

We will pursue focused opportunities that fit our capacity, working with others where their expertise and resources can help turn proposals into protection.

3. Developing the Keep Childhood Human campaign

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

The campaign asks how we can preserve opportunities for friendship, play, and independent thought as AI becomes more present in children’s lives. It also recognises the importance of trusted adults and learning through real-world experience, including disagreement and mistakes.

We have gathered input from developmental psychologists and child-safety professionals to inform this work. Further development will depend on the capacity and support available, with an initial emphasis on clear public communication and practical ways to support the campaign’s aims.

Maintaining useful, accessible guidance

Our free resources remain a core part of SAIFCA’s contribution. They help families, educators, and other professionals respond to harms while stronger protections are pursued.

We will prioritise keeping key guidance useful and current, and address emerging issues where accessible information can help prevent serious harm. Decisions about new resources will take account of the evidence, gaps in existing guidance, and the time required to maintain them.

This work also supports our campaigns by explaining the practical consequences of unsafe systems and the limits of what families and schools can address alone.

Choosing where to focus

SAIFCA is a small, founder-led organisation working in a rapidly changing field. We must make deliberate choices about where to direct our time and resources.

We consider the seriousness and urgency of a risk, the evidence available, and the children likely to be affected. We also assess whether SAIFCA can make a useful contribution and whether there is a realistic opportunity to influence protection.

A new opportunity does not automatically become a new workstream. Some contributions are best made through a focused submission, an existing partnership, or sharing relevant work. Larger projects require an appropriate plan and sufficient resources.

Addressing present-day harms and preventing wider risks to children’s futures are both integral to our mission. The balance of activity will respond to evidence and opportunities for effective action.

Assessing progress

We look for evidence that our work is reaching relevant people and helping inform their decisions. This can include families and professionals using guidance, organisations drawing on our proposals, or policymakers engaging with the protections we advocate.

We distinguish those signs of engagement from changes in protection. Citations, signatures, and meetings can help work progress, but their value depends on what follows.

Where possible, we will examine whether our contribution informs safer practice, stronger policy requirements, or effective oversight. We will describe our role accurately, recognising that change usually involves many people and organisations.

Sustaining the work

Reliable funding is necessary to maintain our existing resources and follow through on opportunities for policy engagement. Additional capacity would allow us to respond more consistently and make better use of the expertise offered by advisers and collaborators.

Our immediate funding need is to sustain the people and time behind the work already underway. Further projects will be developed in line with available support, without compromising SAIFCA’s independence.

We welcome enquiries from individuals, organisations, and funders interested in supporting these priorities. Please contact info@safeaiforchildren.org.

Read more about our mission and our organisation.