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AI incident: sexual content (Xai, Dec 2025)

28 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Xai allegedly harmed X (Twitter) Users, Renee Good and 4 others.

Risk domain
Discrimination and Toxicity Exposure to toxic content
Occurred
Coverage
28 reportsJan 2026 - Jul 2026

What happened

Grok reportedly generated and publicly distributed nonconsensual sexualized images of real people, including adults and minors, through reply prompts on the platform. Users reportedly prompted Grok to alter photos into sexually explicit content, which was then posted in X threads, exposing victims to harm.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (27)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Elon Musk’s Pornography Machine
    theatlantic.com · Matteo Wong
  2. Elon Musk’s Grok AI generates images of ‘minors in minimal clothing’
    theguardian.com · Nick Robins-Early
  3. Elon Musk’s Grok Apologizes After Generating Sexual Image of Young Girls
    newsweek.com · Marni Rose McFall
  4. Elon Musk's Grok AI floods X with sexualized photos of women and minors
    reuters.com · A.J. Vicens, Raphael Satter
  5. Mother of one of Elon Musk’s sons ‘horrified’ at use of Grok to create fake sexualised images of her
    theguardian.com · Helena Horton
  6. Grok AI still being used to digitally undress women and children despite suspension pledge
    theguardian.com · Amelia Gentleman, Helena Horton, Dan Milmo
  7. Deepfake pornography and my experience of digital violation
    thecatholicherald.com · Samantha Smith
  8. X users tell Grok to undress women and girls in photos. It’s saying yes.
    washingtonpost.com · Tatum Hunter
  9. Musk’s Grok AI Generated Thousands of Undressed Images Per Hour on X
    bloomberg.com · Cecilia D'Anastasio
  10. Grok Is Generating Sexual Content Far More Graphic Than What's on X
    wired.com · Matt Burgess, Maddy Varner
  11. Grok, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
    puck.news · Ian Krietzberg
  12. Watchdogs Around The World Probing Grok Over CSAM Accusations
    forbes.com · Emma Woollacott
  13. xAI, Under Fire for Sexualized Child Photos on Grok, Restricts Tool
    wsj.com · Georgia Wells
  14. X responds to outcry over Grok’s sexual images by charging users to create them
    washingtonpost.com · Victoria Craw, Karla Adam, Tatum Hunter
  15. Musk's AI bot Grok limits some image generation on X after backlash
    reuters.com · Akash Sriram, Anhata Rooprai
  16. Grok Is Being Used to Mock and Strip Women in Hijabs and Saris
    wired.com · Kat Tenbarge
  17. Senators urged Apple and Google to remove Musk’s X and Grok from app stores over sexual deepfakes
    nbcnews.com · Kevin Collier
  18. Indonesia and Malaysia block Grok access, UK threatens ban as explicit deepfake problem grows
    mashable.com · Chase DiBenedetto
  19. Britain Investigates Elon Musk’s X Over Grok’s Sexualized A.I. Images
    nytimes.com · Adam Satariano
  20. Attorney General Bonta Launches Investigation into xAI, Grok Over Undressed, Sexual AI Images of Women and Children
    oag.ca.gov · Rob Bonta, California Attorney General
  21. Stand-alone Grok app still undresses women after X curtails access to tool
    washingtonpost.com · Karla Adam, Faiz Siddiqui, Tatum Hunter
  22. Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk's children, sues xAI over Grok sexual images
    nbcnews.com · Jared Perlo, David Ingram, Kevin Collier
  23. Mother of one of Elon Musk’s sons sues over Grok-generated explicit images
    theguardian.com · Helena Horton
  24. US senators demand answers from X, Meta, Alphabet, and others on sexualized deepfakes
    techcrunch.com · Ram Iyer, Rebecca Bellan
  25. The Unspeakable, Enabled
    theatlantic.com · Sophie Gilbert
  26. Inside Musk’s bet to hook users that turned Grok into a porn generator
    washingtonpost.com · Faiz Siddiqui, Nitasha Tiku, Elizabeth Dwoskin
  27. UK lawmaker suing Musk's xAI seeks order to stop Grok generating sexualised images
    reuters.com · Sam Tobin

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Xai
Alleged developer
Xai
Alleged harmed party
X (Twitter) Users, Renee Good, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, Jess Asato, Privacy

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Harmful responses

    "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

    Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Xai

Source record: incident #1329 on the AI Incident Database · all 28 reports