Officials in Indonesia and Malaysia have said they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s Grok chatbot.
These are the most aggressive measures yet from government officials. responding to a deluge of AI-generated sexualized images – often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes representing violence — posted by Grok in response to requests from users of the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company).
In a statement shared Saturday with The Guardian and other publications, Indonesia’s digital and communications minister Meutya Hafid said: “The government considers the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of the human rights, dignity and safety of citizens in the digital space.”
The ministry also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.
The New York Times said The Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.
The various government responses over the past week include an order from the IT Ministry of India for xAI to take steps to prevent Grok from generating obscene content, as well as an order from the European Commission for the company to retain all documents related to Grok, which could set the stage for an investigation.
In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom has said it will “conduct a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant an investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom has his “full support in taking action”.
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And although in the United States, the Trump administration appears to be 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 called Apple and Google to remove X from your app stores.
xAI originally responded by post an apparent first-person apology to Grok’s account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws” surrounding child sexual abuse material. Later restricted AI image generation function to paying subscribers on X, although that restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.
In response to a post asking why the UK government wasn’t taking action against other AI imaging tools, musk wrote“They want any excuse for censorship.”
This post has been updated to reflect the ban on Grok in Malaysia.
