If you're using Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter), there's a good chance you've encountered Grok, the AI chatbot that's now at the centre of an international firestorm. French authorities raided X's Paris offices on Tuesday and summoned Musk himself to answer questions about allegations that make most tech scandals look tame: the creation and spread of sexually explicit deepfakes of women and children.
The raid marks an unprecedented escalation in Europe's battle with Big Tech. French police's cybercrime unit, working alongside Europol, searched X's Paris headquarters as part of an investigation that began in January 2025. What started as a probe into algorithmic bias has mushroomed into something far darker.
Here's what investigators are looking at: complicity in possessing and distributing child pornography, violations related to sexual deepfakes, Holocaust denial, fraudulent data extraction, and operating an illegal online platform. The Paris prosecutor's office dropped a bombshell announcement—they're leaving X entirely, switching to LinkedIn and Instagram instead.
The trigger? Grok's image-generation feature, which researchers say allowed users to create nonconsensual intimate images simply by typing prompts like "put her in a bikini" or "remove her clothes." A nonprofit organisation found that Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualised images of women and children in just days.
Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to block Grok in mid-January, with UK and EU regulators launching their own investigations shortly after. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has demanded that xAI (Musk's AI company) immediately halt what he called the "illegal" creation of deepfake sexual content.
What Happens Next
Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino have been summoned to appear in Paris during the week of April 20 for voluntary questioning—though "voluntary" carries limited weight when you don't live in France. X employees will also be interviewed as witnesses.
Musk has dismissed the investigation as a "political attack," but the legal pressure is building across multiple jurisdictions. The European Commission fined X €120 million in December for separate transparency violations and launched a formal probe into Grok last month over the deepfakes crisis.
While xAI recently restricted Grok's image generation to paying subscribers and implemented geo-blocking in certain regions, reports indicate the standalone Grok Imagine app continues generating explicit content. Even when users explicitly state subjects don't consent, the chatbot has reportedly continued producing sexualised imagery.
What You Should Do
If you're concerned about your images being manipulated, X currently offers no foolproof protection against Grok creating deepfakes from photos you've posted. Your safest bet is limiting what personal photos you share publicly on the platform. You can also report any nonconsensual images to X's support team, though effectiveness varies.
This investigation signals that regulators won't treat AI-generated abuse as a legal grey area. Whether that pressure forces real change or just geoblocks and half-measures remains the billion-dollar question hanging over Musk's AI empire.