Officials from Indonesia and Malaysia have said they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot Grok.
These are the most aggressive moves so far from government officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated imagery — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes depicting violence — posted by Grok in response to requests from users on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)
In a statement shared Saturday with the Guardian and other publications, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister Meutya Hafid said, “The government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space.”
The ministry has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.
The New York Times said the Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.
Varied governmental responses over the past week include an order from India’s IT ministry for xAI to take action to prevent Grok from generating obscene content, as well as an order from the European Commission for the company to retain all documents related to Grok, potentially setting the stage for an investigation.
In the United Kingdom, the communications regulator Ofcom has said that it will “undertake a swift assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview Ofcom has his “full support to take action.”
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And while in the United States, the Trump administration appears to be staying silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and led the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year), Democratic senators have called on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.
xAI initially responded by posting a seemingly first-person apology to the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws” around child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, though that restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.
In response to a post wondering why the U.K. government wasn’t taking action against other AI image generation tools, Musk wrote, “They want any excuse for censorship.”
This post has been updated to reflect Malaysia’s ban on Grok.
