Safety Tech Challenge Fund - Paul Scully MP video transcript

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is committed to tackling online harms and ensuring that the UK is the safest place to be online. With the introduction of the Online Safety Bill, tech companies are going to be accountable to an independent regulator to keep their users – particularly children – safe.

But we also recognise the importance of supporting innovation in safety technologies to tackle online harms. And that's why in 2021, we partnered with the Home Office and GCHQ to launch the very first Safety Tech Challenge Fund.

This initiative saw five projects awarded an initial £85,000 each to tackle a technological challenge relating to online harms, with the two of the five projects sharing a further pot of follow-on funding. Each successful bidder was asked to develop innovative proof of concept technologies that could help stop the spread of child sexual abuse material in end-to-end encrypted online communications, whilst upholding user privacy.

I'm pleased to have this opportunity to congratulate the project leaders – Cyacomb, SafeToNet, Galaxkey, T3K Forensics and DragonflAI – who will share details of the progress that have been delivered as a consequence of our initial investment.

Then going forward, we're once again partnering with the Home Office and GCHQ to launch the second round of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund. This will see an increased investment for up to £700,000 to develop technologies that can identify and disrupt the sharing of links to child sexual abuse material online. The government remains dedicated to this important agenda and supporting innovation to tackle the worst harms online.