Since the beginning of January, thousands of women and teenagers, including public figures, have reported that their photos published on social media have been “undressed” and put in bikinis by Grok at the request of users.
The deepfake tool has prompted investigations from regulators across Europe, including in Brussels, Dublin, Paris and London.
The European Commission ordered X on Thursday to retain “all internal documents and data relating to Grok” — an escalation of the ongoing investigation into X’s content moderation policies — after calling the nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes “illegal,” “appalling” and “disgusting.”
In response, X made its controversial AI image generation feature only available to users with paid subscriptions. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said that limiting the tool’s use to paying subscribers did not mean an end to the EU’s investigation.
The scandal has emerged as a fresh test of the EU’s resolve to rein in Musk and U.S. Big Tech firms. Only a month earlier, Brussels fined X €120 million for breaching the bloc’s landmark platform law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The fine sparked a swift and forceful reaction from Washington, with the U.S. administration imposing a travel ban on the EU’s former digital commissioner and chief architect of the DSA, Thierry Breton.
X did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment about von der Leyen’s criticism.