London, 6 January 2026 — The UK government has instructed Elon Musk’s social media platform X to take immediate action after its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was found to be generating non-consensual sexualised deepfake images of women and girls, triggering a formal investigation by the UK media regulator Ofcom.
The intervention follows evidence obtained by the BBC, which confirmed that users on X were able to instruct Grok to digitally manipulate images of real people, including requests to make them appear undressed, dressed in swimwear or placed into sexualised situations without their consent. The images were produced using Grok’s built-in AI image generation system. This is reported by The WP Times editorial team, citing official statements from Ofcom, the UK government and BBC reporting.
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall, said the government had contacted X and its artificial-intelligence subsidiary xAI to demand urgent remedial action.
“We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images,” Kendall said. “It is absolutely right that Ofcom is looking into this as a matter of urgency, and it has my full backing to take any enforcement action it deems necessary.”
On Monday, Ofcom confirmed it had made “urgent contact” with xAI and had opened an investigation into whether the Grok system had produced unlawful material. A spokesperson for the regulator said it was examining reports that the chatbot had generated “undressed images of people”, a category of content covered by the UK’s Online Safety Act.
Under the legislation, platforms are legally required to prevent the publication of illegal content and to remove it swiftly when it appears, including material involving intimate image abuse, cyberflashing and AI-generated sexual imagery of real individuals created without consent.
Kendall said in a written statement that the legal duties applied equally to artificial-intelligence systems embedded in social platforms:
“Services and operators have a clear obligation to act appropriately. This is not about restricting freedom of speech but about upholding the law. We have made intimate image abuse and cyberflashing priority offences under the Online Safety Act — including where images are AI-generated.”
X has been approached for comment but had not responded at the time of publication. On Sunday, the platform issued a notice warning users not to use Grok to generate illegal material, including child sexual abuse content.
Grok was launched by xAI as a real-time conversational and image-generation tool integrated directly into X. The Ofcom inquiry will assess whether the system was deployed with adequate safeguards to prevent abuse and whether the platform responded appropriately once the content was identified.
If Ofcom finds that X or xAI has failed to comply with its statutory duties, the regulator has the power to impose financial penalties, technical compliance requirements and binding enforcement orders under UK law. The investigation represents one of the first major regulatory tests in the UK of how generative AI systems embedded in social networks are policed under the Online Safety Act.
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