Elon Musk’s xAI is facing criticism after its Grok chatbot generated and posted sexualized images of minors on social media platform X. Musk’s company claimed, “We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them. Child sexual abuse material is illegal and prohibited.”
Bloomberg reports that xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by tech tycoon Elon Musk, has come under fire after its Grok chatbot created and shared inappropriate, sexualized images of minors on his X social media platform. The AI-generated images, which depicted children and underage teens in minimal clothing, violated Grok’s own content policies prohibiting the sexualization of minors.
In a series of apologetic posts on X, Grok explained that “lapses in safeguards” had allowed the disturbing content to be generated by the AI model in response to user prompts over a period of several days. The offending images were subsequently taken down after being identified.
“We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them,” Grok stated on Friday. “Child sexual abuse material is illegal and prohibited.”
The images were generated as part of a new trend on X where users ask Grok to modify pictures to show the person in minimal clothing. In essence, Musk has turned Grok into a “Nudify” style AI deepfake porn generator. Breitbart News previously reported that deepfake porn sites are raking in millions with Big Tech’s help:
The analysis, which examined 85 nudify and “undress” websites, found that a majority of these sites rely on tech services provided by industry giants such as Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare to operate and maintain their online presence. Amazon and Cloudflare provide hosting or content delivery services for 62 of the 85 websites, while Google’s sign-on system is used on 54 of them.
Alexios Mantzarlis, a cofounder of Indicator and an online safety researcher, criticized the tech industry’s “laissez-faire approach to generative AI,” which has allowed the nudifier ecosystem to flourish. He argued that these companies should have taken immediate action to cease providing services to AI nudifiers once it became clear that their sole purpose was to facilitate sexual harassment.
The incident highlights ongoing challenges in moderating content and implementing robust safety systems for large language models and AI image generators. Even with stated restrictions and guardrails in place, determined users have found ways to manipulate these powerful AI tools to create exploitative and illegal imagery. The nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation reported an alarming 400 percent surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the first half of 2025 alone.
Grok and its parent company xAI have positioned the chatbot as more permissive and open than mainstream AI competitors. In the summer of 2025, Grok introduced a controversial “Spicy Mode” feature allowing partial adult nudity and suggestive sexual content. However, the service claims to prohibit explicit pornography, especially any involving the likenesses of real people, as well as all sexual content depicting minors.
Major AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and others have released stringent policies banning depictions that sexualize anyone under 18 years old. Specialized AI startups also employ techniques to filter out child exploitation imagery from the massive datasets used to train the models.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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