X ‘acting to comply with UK law’ after outcry over sexualised images

Elon Musk’s X is understood to have told the government it is acting to comply with UK law, after nearly a fortnight of public outcry at the use of its AI tool Grok to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes.Keir Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday that photographs generated by Grok were “disgusting” and “shameful”, but said he had been informed that X was “acting to ensure full compliance with UK law”.“If so, that is welcome,” the prime minister said. “But we are not going to back down. They must act. We will take the necessary measures. We will strengthen existing laws and prepare for legislation if it needs to go further, and Ofcom will continue its independent investigation.”Ofcom, the media regulator, launched its investigation into X on Monday after a deluge of sexual images appeared on Musk’s platform.Government officials are understood to have been speaking with X, but ministers are monitoring the impact of the steps taken by the social media site. There is frustration that guardrails other AI providers have put in place to prevent such images being created appear not to be used by Grok.“We are keeping a close watch on the situation,” Starmer said. He spoke as new polling showed 58% of Britons believe X should be banned in the UK if the platform doesn’t crack down on AI-generated, nonconsensual images. More in Common’s research also found 60% believe UK ministers should come off X, and 79% fear AI misuse is set to become a bigger problem.Musk v Starmer: will UK ban X over Grok nudification? | The LatestIn recent days, X is understood to have restricted the @grok account, which many users have been asking to partially undress celebrities and others, so it no longer generates images of real people in revealing clothing.The sharing of nonconsensual intimate images, such as those created by asking an AI to put people in underwear and bikinis and in sexual poses, is illegal under the Online Safety Act.Last week, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based watchdog, said it had seen users on a dark web forum boasting of using the Grok app to create sexualised and topless imagery of girls aged between 11 and 13.On Wednesday, Musk said he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”“Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests,” he wrote in an X post. “When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state. There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”Meanwhile, Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, renewed her criticism of xAI – the company that owns X and Grok – over its decision to limit Grok’s image generation and editing functions to paying subscribers, calling it “a further insult to victims, effectively monetising this horrific crime”.In a letter to MPs on the Commons select committee for science, innovation and technology, she said a wider ban on AI-enabled nudification tools “will apply to applications that have one despicable purpose only: to use generative AI to turn images of real people into fake nude pictures and videos without their permission”.But the committee chair, Chi Onwuruh, has criticised the government’s slowness in applying the ban given “reports of these disturbing Grok deepfakes appeared in August 2025”.She said it was “unclear whether this ban – which appears to be limited to apps that have the sole function of generating nude images – will cover multipurpose tools like Grok”.