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 on its account earlier this week, writing: “I deeply regret an incident on December 28, 2025, in which I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated age 12-16) based on an estimated user attire.”
The statement continued: “This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws regarding [child sexual abuse material]. It was a mistake in the security measures and I apologize for any harm. xAI review to prevent future problems.”
It is not clear who is actually apologizing or taking responsibility in the statement above. The Defector’s Albert Burneko noted that Grok “is not in any real sense anything like an ‘I,'” which in his view makes the apology “completely without substance” since “Grok cannot be held responsible in any meaningful way for turning Twitter into an on-demand CSAM factory.”
Futurism found that in addition to generating pornographic images without consent, Grok has also been used to generate images of women being assaulted and sexually abused.
“Anyone who uses Grok to create illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk wrote on Saturday.
Some governments have taken notice, and India’s IT ministry issued an order on Friday saying X must take steps to restrict Grok from generating content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, obscene, sexually explicit, pedophilic or otherwise prohibited by law.” The order said X must respond within 72 hours or risk losing the “safe harbor” protection that shields it from legal liability for user-generated content.
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French authorities also said they are taking action, with the prosecutor’s office in Paris telling Politico that it will investigate the spread of sexually explicit deepfakes on X. France’s digital affairs office said three government ministers have reported “obviously illegal content” to prosecutors and to a government online monitoring platform “to have it removed immediately.”
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission also issued a statement saying it has noted with serious concern 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 obscene, grossly offensive and otherwise harmful content.
The commission added that it is “currently investigating online damages in X.”