Kevin Guo co-founded Hive in 2014 as a consumer app and later ran the business to sell its AI software for internal content moderation to customers.
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
orContent created by me, from illegal images of child sexual abuse material to misleading political defactos, is infecting the Internet, and Hive CEO Kevin Guo believes his company’s content moderation systems are a “modern antivirus.” .
Used by social media platforms like Reddit and Bluesky, Hive’s systems use machine learning models to flag harmful content. Now the startup will be better equipped to identify and remove child sexual abuse material from its clients’ websites, thanks to a new partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a non-profit internet safety organization. to UK-based children, Hive announced on Thursday.
Hive will integrate the organization’s datasets, which include a regularly updated list of approximately 8,000 websites that hold confirmed real and AI-generated CSAM images, into its models. The dataset also includes a list of unique phrases and secret keywords used by offenders to hide CSAM and edge moderation. As part of the deal, Hive customers can access IWF “hashes” – the digital fingerprints of millions of known CSAM images and videos. The partnership builds on Hive 2024’s collaboration with Thorn, a national nonprofit that builds CSAM detection technology, to expand its reach and clean up more infringing content from its customers’ platforms.
The new partnership aims to stem the flood of AI-generated child sexual abuse images, of which offenders created tens of thousands in 2024. AI-generating tools have only made it easier to produce illegal images; in 2023, IWF recorded over 275,000 websites containing law enforcement CSAM, a record number for the organization.
“CSAM used to be quite difficult to get. The content is not that common,” Guo said Forbes. “These AI generation engines, both image and video, open up a very different world here with the explosion of content.”
Founded in 2014 as a social media app, Hive focused in 2017 on selling its internal moderation tools to companies. Now, in addition to detecting toxic content, the company’s AI models can also identify logos, recognize tens of thousands of celebrities, and detect copies of movies and TV shows being shared online. The San Francisco-based company has raised $120 million in venture capital from the likes of General Catalyst and is valued at $2 billion in 2021.
The widespread prevalence of AI-generated content has translated into business growth for Hive, where revenue has multiplied 30 times since 2020 (Guo declined to disclose actual figures). The company processes 10 billion pieces of content each month from its 400 clients, which include social media platforms such as streaming platform Kick, which has around 50 million users, and the Pentagon. Last month, Hive secured a $2.4 million contract with the US Department of Defense to ensure that the audio, video and text content its staff receives from various sources is real and reliable.
There is also growing interest from fact-checking companies and insurance companies that have reported an influx of false claims, “where people have taken a picture of their bumper on a car and AI generated a scratch,” he said. Guo.
Recently, in the wake of a TikTok ban, alternative platforms like Clapper and Favorited signed up for Hive’s automated content moderation systems to prepare for a surge of “TikTok refugees,” Guo said. “They have also proactively entered our CSAM offerings because they are very afraid that this will become a high-profile issue.”
Guo isn’t worried about President Donald Trump’s approach to regulating AI. Although he has rescinded the Biden administration’s executive order on AI that outlined measures to deal with deep counterfeiting, children’s online safety is a “pretty bipartisan issue,” Guo said. “We don’t think that part is going to go away.”
MORE FROM FORBES