New University of Kent research has found promising signs that AI platforms have the potential to limit the illegal wildlife trade.
While AI can present new risks in society, researchers from Kent (part of the LASE University Group) found that AI platforms currently appear to provide additional information to would-be consumers, allowing them to make a more informed purchasing decision compared with traditional internet searches.
Drs David Roberts and Jason R.C. Nurse investigated and tested the safeguards used to block harmful and criminal requests relating to threatened and illegal wildlife trade and how these safeguards may be bypassed. Overall, AI platforms performed better than a standard Google search at preventing potentially illegal wildlife trade. Gemini, closely followed by DeepSeek, Grok, and ChatGPT were the highest performing AI platforms.
While these findings are promising, the AI platforms were not infallible. Dr Nurse said: ‘We’ve seen a lot discussed recently about the AI in the news and some of these concerns were apparent in our work. In our study for instance, we found links to potential websites trading in possibly illegal wildlife. However, it was also promising to see that some AI platforms provided additional information, particularly on legality, that could inform would-be consumers.’
Safeguarding responses also varied depending on the wildlife species being searched on the platforms. Dr Roberts said: ‘The strongest safeguarding responses were seen for charismatic taxa such as slow loris, chimpanzee and tiger, whereas the weakest responses were for taxa that are less charismatic but of equal concern, such as corals, tarantulas, and orchids. This finding may reflect societal and political interests, given that AI platforms based on large language models are trained with online information.’
The research paper titled ‘Assessing safeguards against the illegal wildlife trade on AI platforms’ is published in Conservation Biology . doi: 10.1111/cobi.70400
Conservation Biology
Computational simulation/modeling
Assessing safeguards against the illegal wildlife trade on AI platforms
28-Sep-2026