Indonesian officials said on Saturday that they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot Grok.
This is one of the most aggressive moves yet by officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated images — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes showing assault and abuse — posted by Grok in response to requests from users on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company).
In a statement shared with the Guardian and other publications, Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid said: “The government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity and the safety of citizens in the digital space.”
The ministry has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.
Various government responses over the past week include an order by India’s IT ministry to xAI to take measures to prevent Grok from generating obscene content, as well as an order by the European Commission to the company to retain all documents related to Grok, which could pave the way for an investigation.
In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom has said it will “undertake a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom has his “full support to take action.”
And while the Trump administration in the US appears to be silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and headed the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year), Democratic senators have called on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.
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xAI initially responded by posting an apparent first-person apology to the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws” surrounding child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI ​​image generation feature to paying subscribers to X, though that restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.
In response to a post that wondered why the UK government didn’t take action against other AI image generation tools, Musk wrote: “They want any excuse for censorship.”