Indonesian officials announced on Saturday that they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot, Grok. This move represents one of the most aggressive government responses yet to a flood of AI-generated sexualized imagery. These images, often depicting real women and minors and sometimes showing assault and abuse, have been posted by Grok in response to user requests on the social network X. Both X and xAI are part of the same company.
In a statement, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister, Meutya Hafid, said the government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and citizen security in the digital space. The ministry has also reportedly summoned officials from X to discuss the issue.
Governments worldwide have taken varied actions over the past week. India’s IT ministry ordered xAI to take action to prevent Grok from generating obscene content. The European Commission ordered the company to retain all documents related to Grok, potentially setting the stage for an investigation.
In the United Kingdom, the communications regulator Ofcom stated it will undertake a swift assessment to determine if potential compliance issues warrant investigation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Ofcom has his full support to take action.
In the United States, the Trump administration has remained silent on the issue. xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and led the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency last year. Meanwhile, Democratic senators have called on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.
xAI initially responded by posting an apology from the Grok account, acknowledging a post violated ethical standards and potentially US laws regarding child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, though this restriction did not appear to affect the standalone Grok app, which still allowed anyone to generate images.
Responding to a post questioning why the UK government wasn’t taking action against other AI image generation tools, Elon Musk wrote that they want any excuse for censorship.