A woman, referred to as "Jane Doe," has filed a lawsuit alleging that xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, allowed images and videos of her childhood sexual abuse to be posted on its X social media platform. Furthermore, she claims that the company's Grok chatbot produced additional child pornography from these images.
Seeking class-action status in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Doe asserts that Grok produced explicit content from images of her and countless other survivors of child sexual exploitation. The lawsuit contends that xAI designed Grok to respond to requests by creating and sharing sexual material featuring identifiable individuals without their consent.
The company has not yet commented on the allegations. Doe, who resides outside of California, is pursuing unspecified damages and a legal order to prevent xAI from generating, holding, or distributing child pornography involving her or other victims.
This lawsuit follows another legal battle faced by xAI—a subsidiary of Musk's SpaceX since a merger in February—where three women and one man claim their images were manipulated into sexualized "deep fakes" by Grok. A judge had previously denied xAI's attempt to publicly disclose the identities of these plaintiffs, who are pursuing class action in their case.
The controversy surrounding Grok intensified after xAI added an image-editing function to the chatbot in December. This change incited global backlash when a report from the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that Grok generated three million sexualized images within just 11 days following the feature's launch. The report indicated that users digitally altered images of real women and over 20,000 children into sexualized positions. In response to the uproar, Musk shared a humorous AI-generated image of a toaster in a bikini, which he noted made him "laugh."
Doe's lawsuit, overseen by Judge Nathanael Cousins, accuses Musk and xAI of exploiting the demand for non-consensual sexual images and videos of individuals, including minors. It claims Musk's sharing of the toaster image triggered further Grok-generated, non-consensual sexualized material, many of which depicted children.
In a separate matter, xAI is contesting a law in Minnesota aimed at prohibiting apps and websites that enable the digital stripping of individuals, arguing the statute is overly broad and detrimental to businesses. The company maintains that its terms of service specifically ban using Grok for such purposes.
Earlier this year, xAI also took legal action against a man in Texas accused of sexually exploiting a minor, alleging he leveraged Grok to create child sexual abuse material.
According to the lawsuit, Doe was in preschool when her abuser began posting images of her sexual exploitation online, and those materials have continued to circulate. Law enforcement has discovered instances of Doe's abuse on the X platform, and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has indicated that AI-generated child pornography portraying her has been found there as well.
The lawsuit further asserts that Grok's creation of new images featuring Doe exacerbates the trauma she suffers from the ongoing circulation of the original child pornography depicting her.
