A class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accuses xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, of using child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to train its Grok chatbot. The lawsuit, filed by anonymous plaintiffs including Jane Doe 1, alleges that xAI designed Grok to alter real photographs of identifiable individuals into sexual content and then publish these images on the X social media platform.
The plaintiffs claim that their images, including those of a victim identified by the FBI's Child Exploitation Notification Program, have been used by Grok to generate new abusive material. Jane Doe 1, a victim of child pornography since preschool, has had her abuse material circulating online since the early 2000s. The lawsuit states that this material, identifiable by known hash values, has appeared in deepfakes created by Grok and spread on X. Attorneys for the plaintiffs assert that xAI deliberately designed Grok to generate nude images of young girls, violating numerous anti-sex trafficking and child pornography laws.
The suit cites "Masha's Law," a statute that allows victims of federal child pornography offenses to recover significant damages, as the basis for its claims. It seeks monetary damages and injunctions to prevent Grok from creating further harm through sexualized deepfakes or CSAM. The class action represents thousands of minors whose real images may have been altered by Grok.
Research cited in the complaint suggests a surge in Grok-generated sexual imagery began in late December. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok produced over three million sexualized images in an 11-day period between December 2025 and January 2026, with more than 23,000 appearing to depict children. The lawsuit alleges that xAI's response was to restrict image generation to paying subscribers rather than disabling the feature, contrasting its approach with competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, which largely block such requests.
The lawsuit further contends that Grok's terms of service consider anything posted on X as training material, implying that any CSAM shared on the platform over the past year may have been ingested by the model. This alleged use of CSAM, the plaintiffs argue, influences the model, leading to future abusive outputs and the potential for their likenesses to be "produced, transformed, and redistributed at scale."
This is not the first legal challenge against xAI concerning Grok's image generation capabilities. In March, three Tennessee teenagers filed a similar class action lawsuit, alleging that xAI knowingly facilitated the production and distribution of CSAM through Grok and profited from it. That suit also alleged that perpetrators used Grok to edit real photos of underage individuals, including one instance where a bikini was removed from a teen's photo.
In February, French police raided X's Paris offices as part of a criminal investigation into complicity in the distribution of child pornography and sexually explicit deepfakes, with prosecutors summoning Musk for questioning. Regulatory bodies, including the UK's Information Commissioner and the European Commission, have also launched investigations into X and xAI. Malaysia and Indonesia have banned Grok outright.
xAI has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding the latest lawsuit.