Indonesia blocks Grok over non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes

Indonesian officials said on Saturday they had temporarily blocked access to xAI’s Grok chatbot.

This is one of the most aggressive moves yet by government officials responding to a deluge of AI-generated sexual images — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes Showing assault and abuse – Published by Grok in response to user requests on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)

in Joint statement with The Guardian In other posts, Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Mutya Hafid said: “The government considers the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes to be a serious violation of human rights, dignity and security of citizens in the digital space.”

The ministry reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.

Various government responses over the past week include an order from India’s Ministry of Information Technology for xAI to take action to prevent Grok from creating obscene content, as well as an order from the European Commission for the company to retain all documents related to Grok, which could pave the way for an investigation.

In the United Kingdom, communications regulator Ofcom said it would “conduct a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom had his “full support to take the necessary action.”

While in the US, the Trump administration appears to be remaining 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 expressed concern about the issue. Called Apple and Google To remove X from their app stores.

xAI initially responded with Posting an apology that appears to be in the first person to Grok’s account, acknowledging that the post “violates ethical standards and possibly US laws” regarding child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI ​​photo creation feature to paying subscribers on X, though this restriction does not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allows anyone to create photos.

In response to a post questioning why the UK government has not taken action against other AI-based image creation tools, Musk wrote“They want any excuse for censorship.”