Three teenagers from the US state of Tennessee (south) sued xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, on Monday, March 16, accusing the Grok chatbot of generating pornographic images of them from real photographs.
The collective lawsuit, which could involve more than a thousand underage victims, is directly related to the proliferation, at New Year’s Eve, of hyper-realistic montages (deepfake, in English) of naked women and children, which generated a wave of indignation around the world and the opening of investigations in several countries and in the state of California.
The complaint, presented in a federal court in San José (California), cites the case of an author — already in prison — who used Grok to transform ordinary photographs of young girls, taken on social media or in school albums, into hyper-realistic sexualized images.
These montages later circulated on X (formerly Twitter), Discord and Telegram, having later migrated to the ‘dark web’, serving as a bargaining chip for other child pornography content.reports the complaint, according to the lawyers representing the three teenagers.
“Seeing my daughter having a panic attack when she realized that these images had been created and published with no hope of deleting them was devastating,” said the mother of one of them, quoted in a statement released by the lawyers.
xAI “deliberately designed Grok to produce sexually explicit content for profit”, without implementing the protection measures used by other major players in the AI sector against child pornography, the lawyers claim.
The complaint is based, in particular, on two US federal laws: the Masha law, which allows victims of child pornography to obtain compensation, and the law on the protection of victims of human trafficking.
The complainants demand compensation and ask that xAI be prevented from allowing this type of assembly.
Platforms are largely exempt from liability in the United States for content posted by users. But “without xAI, this illegal content would never have existed”argues Annika K. Martin, lawyer at Lieff Cabraser.
According to a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Grok will have generated around three million sexualized images in just 11 days by the end of 2025of which 23,000 represented minors.
Faced with the wave of outrage, in mid-January xAI restricted the generation of images with Grok only to its paying subscribers and guaranteed to block the generation of sexualized images “in jurisdictions where it is illegal.”
Elon Musk, who speaks daily on X, criticizes government regulations, accused of wanting to “suppress freedom of expression”.
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