French and Malaysian authorities are investigating Grok for generating sexualized deepfakes

Summary

Over the past few days, France and Malaysia have joined India in condemning Grok for creating sexualized deepfakes of women and minors. The chatbot, built by Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI and featured on his social media platform X, posted an apology to its account earlier this week, writing, “I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt.” The statement continued, “This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on [child sexual abuse material]. It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.” It’s not clear who is actually apologizing or accepting responsibility in the statement above. Defector’s Albert Burneko noted that Grok is “not in any real sense anything like an ‘I’,” which in his view makes the apology “utterly without substance” as “Grok cannot be held accountable in any meaningful way for having turned Twitter into an on-demand CSAM factory.” Futurism found that in addition to generating nonconsensual pornographic images, Grok has also been used to generate images of women being assaulted and sexually abused. “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk posted on Saturday. Some governments have taken notice, with India’s IT ministry issuing an order on Friday saying that X must take action to restrict Grok from generating content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law.” The order said that X must respond within 72 hours or risk losing the “safe harbor” protections that shield it from legal liability for user-generated content. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 French authorities also said they are taking action, with the Paris prosecutor’s office telling Politico that it will investigate the prolif...