Officials in Indonesia and Malaysia have announced a temporary ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok. This marks the most significant step taken by governments in response to a surge of sexualized, AI-generated images—often featuring real women and minors, and at times depicting violence—that Grok produced in response to user requests on the platform X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)
In a statement shared with the Guardian and other outlets, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister, Meutya Hafid, emphasized, “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 summoned officials from X for discussions regarding the issue.
The New York Times reported that the Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.
In the past week, various governments have issued responses, including an order from India’s IT ministry urging xAI to prevent Grok from generating obscene content. Additionally, the European Commission has instructed the company to retain all documents related to Grok, which may lead to an investigation.
In the United Kingdom, communications regulator Ofcom stated it would conduct a prompt assessment to identify any compliance issues that may warrant an investigation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed his full support for Ofcom taking necessary actions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration in the U.S. has remained quiet on the matter, despite xAI CEO Elon Musk being a significant donor to Trump and leading the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year. Democratic senators have urged Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.
Initially, xAI responded by posting an apology from the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws” regarding child sexual abuse material. The company restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, although this restriction did not apply to the Grok app, which still permitted anyone to create images.
In response to a post questioning why the U.K. government wasn’t taking action against other AI image generation tools, Musk remarked, “They want any excuse for censorship.”
This post has been updated to include Malaysia’s ban on Grok.
