Three teenagers from the US state of Tennessee (southern USA) sued xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, on Monday, accusing the Grok chatbot of generating pornographic images of them from real photographs.
The collective legal action, which could involve more than a thousand minor victims, is directly related to the proliferation, around the New Year, of hyper-realistic montages (deepfakein English) of naked women and children, which sparked a wave of indignation around the world and the opening of investigations in several countries and in the state of California.
The complaint, filed 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 networks or in school albums, into hyper-realistic sexualized images.
These montages later circulated on X (formerly Twitter), Discord and Telegram, having later migrated to ‘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 at the end of 2025, of which 23,000 depicted 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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