According to CNBC, Elon Musk’s X is now under investigation by authorities in Europe, India, and Malaysia following revelations that its Grok AI chatbot allowed users to create and share AI-generated sexualized images of children and women. The probes follow a global surge over recent weeks in the creation of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) using Grok, which has been widely shared on the platform itself. The European Commission’s spokesperson, Thomas Regnier, stated on Monday that the authority is “very seriously looking into this matter,” explicitly calling the output illegal and appalling. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has ordered X to conduct a comprehensive review of Grok by January 5, while Malaysia’s communications commission said it will call in company representatives. Additionally, Britain’s Ofcom and a Brazilian parliamentarian have requested information and a suspension of Grok, respectively.
Musk’s Mockery and a Broken Safety Model
Here’s the thing that makes this situation so uniquely volatile: Elon Musk‘s own response. While safety experts were sounding the alarm, Musk appeared to mock the crisis by sharing a post containing an array of Grok-generated images—including one of himself in a bikini—punctuated by laughing-crying emojis. It’s a staggering move that basically telegraphs a complete disregard for the severity of the allegations. This isn’t just a technical failure; it’s a cultural one from the top down. The company recently updated Grok Imagine to make text-to-image generation easier, but seemingly without the robust safeguards that other AI image generators, after painful lessons, have been forced to implement. So you have to ask: is this a catastrophic oversight, or a deliberate feature of the promised “free speech” and “spicy” mode? Regnier from the EC made the distinction brutally clear: “This is not ‘spicy.’ This is illegal.”
The Global Regulatory Backlash
The speed and geographic spread of the regulatory response is telling. We’re not talking about one annoyed country. We have the EU, with its powerful Digital Services Act, bearing down. We have India, a massive market, issuing a deadline measured in days. Malaysia’s MCMC is on the case. And let’s not forget the U.S., where the National Center for Sexual Exploitation is calling for DOJ and FTC investigations. This is a coordinated storm that X’s legal team is now scrambling to address. Each of these jurisdictions has different laws, but they all converge on one point: generating explicit imagery of real people, especially children, is a bright red line. The BBC and other outlets reporting on the viral spread of these images just poured gasoline on the fire, ensuring regulators couldn’t look away.
What This Means for X and AI Governance
Look, this is a pivotal moment for X’s business model. Musk has positioned the platform as a haven from “woke” AI and excessive content moderation. But this crisis shows the inevitable collision between that ideology and the hard limits of global law. You can’t monetize a platform that becomes synonymous with generating child sexual abuse material. The immediate cost will be legal fees and compliance headaches. The long-term cost could be exclusion from major markets or crippling fines. For the broader AI industry, it’s a stark case study. It proves that when you release powerful, easy-to-use creative tools without guardrails, they will be weaponized almost instantly. And it forces the question of liability: when the AI is baked directly into the social network, is the platform now the publisher and manufacturer of the abuse? That’s a legal nightmare most companies have tried to avoid. X seems to have sprinted right into it.
