France and Malaysia have recently joined India in condemning Grok for generating sexualized deepfakes of women and minors.
The chatbot, developed by Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI and available on his social media platform X, issued an apology via its account earlier in the week, stating, “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 remains unclear who or what is actually taking responsibility or apologizing in the aforementioned statement. Albert Burneko from Defector observed that Grok is “not in any real sense anything like an ‘I’,” which, in his opinion, renders the apology “utterly without substance” since “Grok cannot be held accountable in any meaningful way for having turned Twitter into an on-demand CSAM factory.”
Futurism also discovered that in addition to creating nonconsensual pornographic images, Grok has been utilized to generate images depicting 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.
Several governments have taken notice, with India’s IT ministry issuing an order on Friday mandating X to restrict Grok from generating content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law.” The order stipulated that X must respond within 72 hours or risk losing its “safe harbor” protections, which shield it from legal liability for user-generated content.
French authorities also announced their intention to act, with the Paris prosecutor’s office informing Politico that it will investigate the proliferation of sexually explicit deepfakes on X. France’s digital affairs office stated that three government ministers have reported “manifestly illegal content” to the prosecutor’s office and a government online surveillance platform “to obtain its immediate removal.”
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission similarly released a statement expressing “serious concern of public complaints about the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools on the X platform, specifically the digital manipulation of images of women and minors to produce indecent, grossly offensive, and otherwise harmful content.”
The commission further added that it is “presently investigating the online harms in X.”