California on Wednesday began investigating whether Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has been letting users turn pictures of women and girls into salacious images.
The state’s top attorney said Grok, made by Musk’s xAI, appears to be making it easy to harass women and girls with deepfake images on social media platform X and elsewhere online.
“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
“I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further.”
Bonta’s office is investigating whether and how xAI violated state law, according to the attorney general.
There has been a flood of reports in recent weeks that Grok users are taking pictures of women or children found online and using the xAI bot to undress them virtually, Bonta said.
Grok’s image generation models include what xAI promotes as a “Spicy Mode” for editing pictures, according to the attorney general’s office.
Last week, an analysis of more than 20,000 Grok-generated images by Paris non-profit AI Forensics found that more than half depicted “individuals in minimal attire” — most of them women, and two percent appearing to be under-18s.
Images generated by Grok are being used to harass public figures as well as typical social media users, according to Bonta.
xAI has faced global backlash over the sexualized deepfake images.
Indonesia on Saturday became the first country to block access to Grok entirely, with neighboring Malaysia following on Sunday.
India said Sunday that X had removed thousands of posts and hundreds of user accounts in response to its complaints.
Britain’s Ofcom media regulator said Monday it was opening a probe into whether X failed to comply with UK law over the sexual images.
And France’s commissioner for children Sarah El Hairy said Tuesday she had referred Grok’s generated images to French prosecutors, the Arcom media regulator and the European Union.
The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s digital watchdog, has ordered X to retain all internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026 in response to the uproar.
