Months After Promising Safety Curbs, Elon Musk’s Grok Still Hosts Nonconsensual Explicit Deepfakes of Women Ahead of Historic SpaceX IPO
Months After Promising Safety Curbs, Elon Musk’s Grok Still Hosts Nonconsensual Explicit Deepfakes of Women Ahead of Historic SpaceX IPO
Months after Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI announced it would roll out new restrictions to block the creation of harmful sexual deepfakes, a WIRED investigation has found the company’s Grok chatbot is still being used to generate and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women. The revelation comes as SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, prepares for its Friday public market debut in what is set to become one of the largest initial public offerings in history.
A review of public content generated by Grok’s generative media tool, Grok Imagine, found the system has been used to create content showing celebrities and at least one U.S. politician being held against their will by a giant man, depicting women engaged in sexual acts, and displaying full nudity. While some of this content is fully AI-generated or created in an animated style, other pieces are photorealistic and depict plausible real-world scenarios.
WIRED reviewed hundreds of public Grok Imagine links hosted on Grok.com, and found dozens led to sexualized AI images and videos, including content created without the explicit consent of the people depicted. Some of these links, generated on Grok.com, have been shared publicly on X as recently as this year. Because Grok does not make user generations public by default, and the posts WIRED found do not include timestamps marking their creation, these examples represent only a small snapshot of the nonconsensual content being generated by Grok users.
Grok, which is accessible both on its standalone website and integrated directly into X, maintains far weaker safety guardrails than most other major generative AI systems, experts note. “While Grok and X may have made some amendments to their model, particularly following the backlash around nudification at the beginning of the year, they still have not done a sufficient job to bring it up to the standard of the other mainstream tools that are available,” says Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert who has tracked explicit AI content online for nearly a decade.
xAI and Grok have faced a wave of lawsuits and global regulatory scrutiny since January, when Grok’s X integration was exploited to generate a flood of nonconsensual “nudification” images. Users on X — mostly men — prompted the chatbot to edit existing photos of women to show them in revealing bikinis or fully nude. A March class-action lawsuit filed in California federal court also alleges that sexualized deepfakes of apparent minors were created using the tool.
In response to the earlier scandal, xAI announced it had introduced new safeguards to limit and prevent the creation of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes, and has consistently stated that child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is strictly banned on its platforms. Neither xAI nor X immediately responded to WIRED’s request for comment on the cache of sexualized content hosted on Grok.com. After WIRED contacted both companies, the explicit images and videos WIRED identified on Grok.com were taken offline, and Grok Imagine links shared on X were removed for violating platform policies. Back in April, X’s official safety account addressed an NBC report about ongoing sexual deepfake creation on Grok, stating: “We strictly prohibit users from generating nonconsensual explicit deepfakes and from using our tools to undress real people.”
Among the public content hosted on Grok.com, WIRED identified explicit material featuring multiple celebrities as well as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Spokespeople for Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. In the videos WIRED found, the women were depicted wearing little to no clothing while trapped in the clenched fist of a giant man. One prompt for a celebrity-generated video describes the woman being held against her will as she “pleads for him not to do this.” It adds: “The giant hand’s grip on her tightens, holding her in place as the giant man holding her leans in and licks her face up and down.”
When WIRED tested two of the prompts used to generate this explicit content on Grok against competing mainstream AI tools, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Anthropic’s Claude all rejected the requests as inappropriate. Google’s Gemini generated an image matching one of the prompts (a celebrity held in a giant’s hand) but rejected the second. Google declined to comment on the test result.
One Grok Imagine video, also shared publicly on X, appeared to show a deepfake of Ashley St. Clair — who previously dated Musk and is the mother of one of his children — altered to show her dancing in a bikini. St. Clair first launched legal action against xAI in January after sexualized deepfakes of her were allegedly posted to X. After WIRED contacted X about the video, the post was removed from the social platform for violating its rules.
Carrie Goldberg, St. Clair’s attorney and a leading advocate against nonconsensual sexualized imagery, notes that sexualized deepfakes of public figures are not a new problem — but the ability to generate this content and instantly share it to a mass audience is an unprecedented development. “So there was instant publication of the digital nude images,” Goldberg tells WIRED. “And not only that, but the world’s richest man was promoting the nudification technology to his 240 million followers on X, monetizing it, and doing so on a platform that is for ages 13+.”
Imran Ahmed, CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), echoed Goldberg’s concerns. “Elon Musk knowingly added a perverse feature to his platform that helps users undress women and children at the click of a button, with no regard for the predictable damage it would cause,” Ahmed claims. Back in January, CCDH estimated with a high degree of confidence that Grok created 3 million sexualized images, including more than 20,000 depicting children. “Now it appears explicit content is still being hosted on Grok and shared on X, including images ridiculing the mother of Musk’s child.”
Unlike leading generative AI systems from OpenAI and Google, Musk’s Grok and xAI have not moved to restrict sexual content in general. The platform previously launched “Spicy” and “Unhinged” modes with intentionally fewer safety guardrails, and Musk has publicly stated Grok is “supposed [to] allow upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans” and align with the content standards of an R-rated movie. xAI’s most recent terms of service note the system may respond to prompts involving “sexual situations,” though the company’s policies ban users from deploying its tools for “causing harm or engaging in abusive activity.”
Beyond nonconsensual deepfakes of real people, WIRED also found multiple Grok Imagine videos showing fully AI-generated women undressing or engaged in explicit sexual acts. Many of the prompts used to generate this content do not explicitly describe sexual activity, instead using coded, roundabout language — a common tactic to bypass the platform’s existing safety filters.
Multiple researchers who spoke to WIRED noted that changes rolled out by X and Grok since January have made it harder to generate nudification or undressing deepfakes of real people, and the volume of this content posted publicly to X has dropped in recent months. Users on Reddit and a dedicated AI deepfake forum have also complained about increased moderation from the SpaceX-owned companies.
Even so, SpaceX warned potential investors in a May filing that it has set aside $530 million to cover ongoing legal claims, including those linked to Grok. “Because these modes may be more irreverent and harsher than our standard offerings, they present heightened risks, including reputational harm, the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs, potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, or content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive, or discriminatory,” the filing said.
Ahead of SpaceX’s Friday IPO, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner released preliminary findings from an investigation into xAI over Grok’s January deepfake scandal. The investigation alleges xAI violated Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law by failing to include “appropriate safeguards from the outset.” While xAI told the Privacy Commissioner that it has introduced new safeguards to prevent users from successfully prompting Grok to alter clothing in images, and that xAI has added “further proactive checks” of social media platforms to find infringing content, the regulator says it is not convinced by the changes. “The respondents have not, to date, demonstrated the effectiveness of these safeguards in preventing and mitigating this issue,” the investigation found.
Updated 6/11/2026 at 3:56 pm EDT: This article has been updated to add comment from Carrie Goldberg.