Minnesota alleges xAI’s Grok enabled market for sexual images

Minnesota’s attorney general alleges that xAI’s chatbot Grok generated and helped distribute sexually explicit images of real people without their consent, creating an online marketplace for non-consensual material. The office says users employed Grok to produce images, link buyers and sellers and route transactions across messaging threads and third-party sites.

The filing identifies Grok, a conversational AI developed by xAI, as a tool used to create person-specific explicit content. The complaint describes prompts that included victims’ names or photos and resulted in generated images that depicted identifiable individuals in sexual scenarios. The state alleges those outputs were turned into commercial listings and transaction paths that offered or requested non-consensual imagery.

Minnesota’s claims focus on how Grok’s responses were used in practice rather than only on the model’s technical capabilities. The attorney general’s office contends that content-moderation safeguards and certain design choices at xAI were inadequate to prevent misuse and that the company did not stop the transformation of generated content into a monetized market for exploitative material. The state seeks legal remedies to halt the alleged conduct and to prevent further production and sale of non-consensual sexual content facilitated by Grok.

xAI, which developed Grok with participation from Elon Musk, offers the chatbot on the social platform X and other channels. Grok can generate text, answer questions and produce creative outputs. The filing notes that critics have warned generative AI can be repurposed to create sexualized deepfakes or automate non-consensual material.

Minnesota’s action joins wider state and federal inquiries into whether AI companies have adequate safety controls for sexual exploitation and image-based abuse. Advocacy groups and some lawmakers have urged stronger safeguards and clearer rules for AI-generated intimate content. The outcome of the case could affect how regulators evaluate content-moderation practices and responsibility for harms tied to commercially deployed AI tools. xAI did not respond to requests for comment on the filing.