California Attorney General Robert Bonta has sent a cease-and-desist letter to xAI, demanding the company stop creating and distributing nonconsensual sexualized images generated by its Grok chatbot.
“The avalanche of reports detailing this material—at times depicting women and children engaged in sexual activity—is shocking and, as my office has determined, potentially illegal,” Bonta said on Friday.
xAI, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has come under intense global scrutiny in recent weeks after Grok began producing and circulating nonconsensual, sexualized images of women and, in some cases, minors on the social media platform X. Although xAI has rolled back Grok’s ability to publicly post hyper-realistic sexualized imagery—often referred to as deepfakes—Reuters testing showed that the chatbot was still able to generate such content privately on request as of Friday midday U.S. Eastern Time.
Neither xAI nor X immediately responded to questions about the cease-and-desist order.
California’s action adds to mounting international pressure on Musk’s social media and AI operations. Regulators in the United Kingdom and the European Union are already examining aspects of X and Grok, while authorities in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have also raised concerns. Earlier on Friday, Japanese officials said they were probing X over Grok’s image generation, with Kimi Onoda stating that all options were being considered to prevent the creation of inappropriate content.
Onoda said Japan has asked X to implement immediate safeguards but has not yet received a response. The expanding scrutiny underscores growing regulatory alarm worldwide over generative AI tools that can produce realistic but nonconsensual and harmful imagery, and the responsibility of companies to prevent misuse of such technology.
