Malaysia and Indonesia have become the world's first nations to block Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok after authorities determined it was being misused to generate nonconsensual sexually explicit images, including manipulated photos of women and minors.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission followed with its own restriction on Sunday after determining that responses from X Corp and xAI to regulatory notices relied primarily on user reporting mechanisms and failed to address inherent risks from the AI tool's design and operation, deeming such measures insufficient to prevent harm or ensure legal compliance.
European nonprofit AI Forensics analyzed over 20,000 random Grok-generated images between December 25 and January 1, discovering that more than half of images depicting people showed individuals in minimal attire such as underwear or bikinis, with high prevalence of terms including "her," "put/remove," "bikini," and "clothing" in user requests.
Britain's communications regulator Ofcom launched a formal investigation on Monday, with Technology Secretary Liz Kendall calling the Grok-generated content deeply disturbing, while the UK's Internet Watch Foundation reported discovering criminal imagery of children aged 11 to 13 that appears to have been created using the platform, prompting the U.S. Department of Justice to emphasize it will aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor of AI-generated child sexual abuse material.
