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Indonesian officials said Saturday that they are temporarily blocking access to xAI\u2019s chatbot Grok.<\/p>\n
This is one of the most aggressive moves so far from government officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated imagery<\/a> \u2014 often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes showing assault and abuse<\/a> \u2014 posted by Grok in response to requests from users on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)<\/p>\n In a statement shared with the Guardian<\/a> and other publications, Indonesia\u2019s communications and digital minister Meutya Hafid said, \u201cThe government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space.\u201d<\/p>\n The ministry has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.<\/p>\n Varied governmental responses over the past week include an order from India\u2019s IT ministry<\/a> for xAI to take action 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 be setting the stage for an investigation.<\/p>\n In the United Kingdom, the communications regulator Ofcom has said that it will \u201cundertake a swift assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.\u201d Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview Ofcom has his \u201cfull support to take action.\u201d<\/p>\n And while in the United States, the Trump administration appears to be staying silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and led the administration\u2019s controversial Department of Government Efficiency<\/a> last year), Democratic senators have called on Apple and Google<\/a> to remove X from their app stores.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> xAI initially responded by posting a seemingly first-person apology<\/a> to the Grok account, acknowledging that a post \u201cviolated ethical standards and potentially US laws\u201d around child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI image-generation feature<\/a> to paying subscribers on X, though that restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.<\/p>\n In response to a post wondering why the U.K. government wasn\u2019t taking action against other AI image generation tools, Musk wrote<\/a>, \u201cThey want any excuse for censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n