In recent days, France and Malaysia have joined India in accusing Grok of creating sexual 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 on its account earlier this week, writing: “We deeply regret the incident on December 28, 2025, when we generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16 years old) dressed in sexual attire based on user prompts.”
The statement continued: “This violated ethical standards and could have violated U.S. law regarding[child sexual abuse content]. This was a failure of safeguards and we apologize for the harm caused. xAI is reviewing this to prevent future issues.”
It is not clear who is actually apologizing or accepting responsibility in the above statement. Defector’s Albert Barneko noted that Grok is “not really ‘me'” and said the apology would be “totally hollow” in his view because “Glok cannot be held accountable in any meaningful way for turning Twitter into an on-demand CSAM factory.”
Futurism found that in addition to generating non-consensual pornographic images, Grok was also used to generate images of women being assaulted and sexually abused.
“Those who use Grok to create illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they uploaded illegal content,” Musk posted on Saturday.
Some governments have also taken notice, with India’s IT Ministry on Friday ordering Grok to take steps to restrict it from producing content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited by law.” The order states that X must respond within 72 hours or risk losing its “safe harbor” protections that shield it from legal liability for user-generated content.
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French authorities have also said they are taking action, with the Paris prosecutor’s office telling Politico it will investigate the prevalence of sexually explicit deepfakes about X. France’s Digital Affairs Agency said three government ministers had reported “clearly illegal content” to the public prosecutor’s office and the government’s online monitoring platform “for immediate removal.”
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission also issued a statement saying it “takes with grave concern complaints from the public regarding the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools on the X platform, particularly the digital manipulation of images of women and minors to create obscene, grossly offensive and otherwise harmful content.”
The committee added, “We are currently investigating the online damage caused by X.”
