Elon Musk is facing his umpteenth controversy and public-relations crisis this week as the worldwide outcry grows over the Grok chatbot's image-editing capability, which combined with X has created a tool for producing and spreading non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes and child sexual abuse material.

True to form, Musk was making light of the situation this week in sophomoric fashion while the world started to go ballistic over Grok, and its image editor without guardrails that lets people create porn-y images of other people — including women they do not know and minors — based on photos posted to X. And because Grok is embedded on the X platform, all of these requests made through the platform become automatically public.

As we reported Monday, after this situation started to explode late last week, countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok altogether, and large countries like France and the UK were launching investigations and threatening blockages as well.

An unofficially-installed poster picturing Elon Musk with the tagline, "Who the fuck would want to use social media with a built-in child abuse tool?" is displayed on a bus shelter on January 13, 2026 in London, England. On Monday, the UK communications regulator Ofcom launched a formal investigation into Elon Musk's social media platform X, regarding its AI chatbot, Grok. The probe centers on reports that Grok has been used to generate non-consensual sexual deepfakes, including "undressed" images of women and sexualized images of children. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon has created a series of posters and public artworks in recent months critical of Elon Musk, as well as other business and political leaders. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Also, last week, three Democratic senators penned an open letter to the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, urging them to remove both X and Grok from their app stores in response to the deepfake scandal. And Bloomberg cited research suggesting that X was producing thousands of these images every hour, becoming the largest producer of sexual material on the web, full stop.

Now California's attorney general is launching his own probe, adding pressure to the powerkeg, and suggesting that xAI may have broken state law.

"The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking," says Bonta in a statement. "This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet. I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further."

The California Attorney General's Office is directing people to an online form where they submit their own specific complaints complaints about Grok.

California Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan [D-San Ramon], who authored a state law that strengthens an existing ban on deepfakes and revenge porn, has been pushing the SF City Attorney's Office and the AG's office to act in this matter, as CalMatters reports.

"Real women are having their images manipulated without consent, and the psychological and reputational harm is devastating," Bauer-Kahan said in a statement. "Underage children are having their images used to create child sexual abuse material, and these websites are knowingly facilitating it."

It seems likely that someone working at xAI could have foreseen these problems arising, but Musk has kept everything with this companies as non-transparent as possible, and one of the only things we know about how Grok works is that, at least at one point last summer, it was seeking out Musk's own tweets on subjects before spitting out its own thoughts on them.

Jennifer Gibson, cofounder and director of Psst, an organization that provides pro bono legal services for potential tech whistleblowers, tells CalMatters that this is a situation where someone at xAI could easily have headed off this maelstrom by sounding the alarm months ago.

"There needs to be a lot more protection for exactly this kind of scenario in which an insider sees that this is foreseeable, knows that this is going to happen, and they need somewhere to go to report to both to keep the company accountable and protect the public," Gibson tells CalMatters.

Anyway, seems like Linda Yaccarino took her leave just in time!

Previously: xAI's Grok Being Blocked, Investigated By Multiple Countries Over the Creation of Sexualized Deepfakes