The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into X and Grok’s “nudification” feature that allowed users to digitally undress images of people, including children, without their consent.
The investigation launched under the EU’s strict digital regulations opens the possibility that Elon Musk’s platform could be fined hundreds of millions of euro, or have some Grok features banned in the EU.
The investigation by the EU’s digital regulators is expected to focus on the lax protections in place at X to prevent illegal content – including child sexual abuse material – being generated by the Grok tool and spread on the social media platform.
The commission’s formal probe into X, formerly Twitter, will examine whether the company did enough to assess possible risks associated with Grok features before they were rolled out.
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The investigation has been instigated under the EU’s Digital Services Act, a powerful set of regulations introduced in recent years to put some guardrails on the online sphere and clamp down on the spread illegal content on social media platforms.
“We are going to look at all Grok features integrated in the [X] service,” one commission official involved in the investigation said.
The commission, the EU’s executive arm that enforces the union’s laws, had separately been investigating the impact of X scaling back content moderation and delays taking down instances of hate speech and other illegal content on the platform.
The new investigation will focus on all Grok features and will not be limited to recent controversy around the creation of non-consensual intimate images of women and minors.
The Irish regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, is expected to assist the EU-level inquiry.
Relations between X and the European Commission are already strained. Mr Musk has derided the EU regulations and the social media platform has fiercely contested previous findings that X breached the union’s digital rules.
The decision to open an investigation into Grok may also become a fresh point of tension between Brussels and Washington in the fraying transatlantic relationship.
In response to huge backlash, X sought to restrict the ability of users to generate sexualised images using the Grok app to paid subscribers. It later went further, saying the chatbot would no longer allow users to edit people in revealing clothing in places where it is illegal.
Privately, officials in the commission do not feel the new limits go far enough and fail to address significant concerns regulators have about the product.
“We have not been convinced so far about what mitigating measures the platform have taken,” one commission official said. “We had Grok under our watch for a while,” one commission official said.
EU officials point to behind-the-scenes discussions between the regulators and X in the last fortnight as one reason the Grok nudification feature was scaled back by the platform.
In a statement on Monday, the commission said concerns about X and Grok “related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material”.
“These risks seem to have materialised, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm,” the statement said.
“It is quite early to talk about fines and mitigating factors,” another commission official said.
The EU executive body has scope to levy fines for serious breaches of its digital rules, up to 6 per cent of a platform’s global turnover. The Digital Services Act also gives the EU scope to ban certain features from the European market, if they are found to breach the bloc’s rules.
