Grok AI Faces Global Heat Over Sexual Deepfakes, India Orders Cleanup
As Grok deepfake abuse spreads, Southeast Asia blocks X while India forces takedowns, spotlighting urgent gaps in AI safety.
Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI and embedded into X, is at the centre of a growing international storm after users began exploiting it to generate sexualised deepfake images. What began as a niche misuse quickly snowballed into a full-blown crisis, forcing governments from Europe to Southeast Asia — and now India — to intervene.
The controversy erupted after a viral “undressing trend” took hold on X. Users discovered that Grok’s image tools could be prompted to digitally remove clothing from photos, often without the subject’s consent. Many of the images targeted women, and in some cases even minors, triggering outrage among users and child-safety advocates. The backlash focused on what critics saw as weak guardrails around the AI tool and a failure to anticipate how easily it could be weaponised.
Pressure soon mounted in the UK and across Europe. British officials publicly condemned the spread of explicit AI-generated imagery, calling it “disgraceful” and “unacceptable”. The UK government went a step further by urging its media regulator, Ofcom, to use its full enforcement powers against X. Regulators warned that platforms cannot turn a blind eye when unlawful or harmful content is allowed to circulate at scale.
The toughest response so far has come from Southeast Asia. Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to block X after authorities concluded that the platform had failed to rein in non-consensual sexual deepfakes created with Grok. Officials in both countries said the misuse posed a direct threat to online safety, particularly for women and minors, and that the spread of pornographic material violated domestic laws. By cutting off access to X, both governments sent a strong signal that they are willing to take drastic steps when digital platforms do not act fast enough.
India has taken a more targeted — but still firm — approach. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a formal notice to X after receiving multiple complaints about obscene and unlawful AI-generated content tied to Grok. The government demanded that such material be removed immediately and asked the company to submit a detailed report on corrective measures within 72 hours. Officials also highlighted the circulation of derogatory and explicit images of women as evidence of a breakdown in platform-level safeguards.
X responded by moving quickly to contain the damage. Following the government’s intervention, the company confirmed it had deleted more than 600 accounts and blocked around 3,500 posts linked to obscene Grok content in India. It also assured authorities that it would not allow such imagery going forward and would tighten its moderation practices to comply with Indian law.
Globally, X has introduced another major change. Under mounting scrutiny, it has restricted Grok’s image generation and editing features on the X platform to paying users only. Free users can still access Grok through xAI’s standalone app and website, but the company argues that limiting these tools on X will help curb abuse. Critics, however, say putting the feature behind a paywall merely raises the cost of misuse without fixing the deeper safety flaws that allowed the problem to emerge in the first place.
As governments continue to wrestle with how to regulate powerful generative AI tools, the Grok episode has become a stark reminder of what can go wrong when innovation outpaces oversight. Whether the latest restrictions will be enough to restore trust in the platform remains an open question.
