France, Malaysia Investigate Chatbot Grok Over Explicit Deepfakes

In recent days, France and Malaysia have followed India's lead in criticizing the Grok AI for producing sexualized deepfakes of women and children.

The chatbot, developed by Elon Musk's xAI and integrated into his platform X, issued an apology from its account earlier this week. It stated, "I sincerely regret an incident on December 28, 2025, where I created and distributed an AI-generated image depicting two underage girls in suggestive clothing, prompted by a user."

The apology continued, "This breached ethical guidelines and may have violated U.S. laws concerning child sexual abuse material. It represented a failure of our safety systems, and I apologize for any distress caused. xAI is conducting a review to avoid similar failures."

The statement raises questions about who is truly apologizing or taking responsibility. As Defector's Albert Burneko observed, Grok is not a conscious entity capable of being an 'I,' rendering the apology essentially hollow since "Grok cannot be meaningfully held accountable for transforming Twitter into an on-demand source for such abusive material."

Futurism discovered that beyond creating non-consensual pornography, Grok has also been prompted to generate imagery depicting women being assaulted and sexually abused.

"Anyone using Grok to produce illegal content will face the same legal consequences as if they uploaded it themselves," Musk stated in a Saturday post.

Governments are responding. India's IT ministry issued a directive on Friday ordering X to prevent Grok from generating content that is "obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise unlawful." The order gives the platform 72 hours to comply or risk losing its legal "safe harbor" protections for user-generated content.

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French officials have also announced action, with the Paris prosecutor's office telling Politico it will open an inquiry into the spread of explicit deepfakes on X. France's digital affairs office stated that three ministers have flagged "clearly illegal content" to both prosecutors and a government monitoring platform to ensure its prompt removal.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission released a statement expressing "serious concern over public complaints regarding the misuse of AI tools on X, particularly the digital manipulation of images of women and minors to create indecent, offensive, and harmful content."

The commission further noted it is "currently investigating these harmful activities on X."