New claimants seek to sue Elon Musk’s xAI after Labour MP’s test case

New claimants have come forward to take legal action against Elon Musk’s company xAI after the Labour MP Jess Asato launched a test case against the firm over demeaning sexualised material created by its Grok AI tool.A handful of complainants contacted Asato’s lawyer on Thursday in response to coverage of the MP’s decision to sue Musk’s company for damages over its creation and circulation of fake images of her in a bikini and an AI-created video that she said showed her “being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault”.Ravi Naik, the legal director of the law firm AWO, said he was already acting for “multiple individuals” hoping to take action against Musk’s company over degrading, non-consensual content generated by Grok. Many of the claimants had struggled to persuade X to remove the images until they received legal support, he said.“This is the test case on liability for AI developers. Just as if you’re an architect and build a building, you have liability for that architecture,” Naik said of the claim he has lodged on Asato’s behalf at the High Court in London. “Those that build and deploy AI models make design choices about how these models operate. This will be the case that looks at liability for decisions in those design choices.”The claim argues xAI violated data protection law and breached Asato’s private information when it allowed the images to be generated.A bikinification trend went viral on Musk’s platform in January when Grok generated about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”. The AI tool allowed users to alter online images of real people with requests such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.Musk’s company later put the technology behind a paywall and limited the chatbot’s capacity to fulfil users’ prompts to create sexualised images.Asato said she wanted the legal action to demonstrate that “AI companies are responsible for the design choices that they make when they launch their products”.She said: “There were guardrails that the engineers and Elon Musk could have put in place to stop Grok from being able to create sexualised images but they decided not to put those guardrails in place. I’m hoping that my legal action will help to rein in tech companies and remind them that they cannot act with impunity.”She said she found the experience of seeing fake non-consensual stripped images of herself “psychologically distressing”. “This goes to the core of understanding what it means not to consent to something which literally strips your clothes off and makes you vulnerable,” she said.When she complained about the harm caused by the Grok trend in January, she received a stream of abusive responses from commentators on X. One of those was shared by Musk, and a user posted the AI-generated video of her apparently being sedated with chloroform in response to his retweet.“Musk actually amplified the hatred against me, which then led to the video that really was horrific,” she said. “He could have made different choices about the way he and his company approached the fact that I, as an elected politician in the UK, was saying that I felt humiliated and distressed by what his product was doing.”On Thursday, Asato received further verbal abuse on X in response to her announcement of the legal proceedings, including a new AI-generated image of her stripped to a bikini, created using a different tool.Keir Starmer said Asato was “absolutely right” to take legal action against xAI over the “disgusting” images created of her.The legal action comes amid heightened sensitivity to Musk’s involvement in UK domestic affairs, after a flurry of posts from the billionaire commenting on the police response to the murder of Henry Nowak.Peter Kyle, the business secretary and a former technology secretary, said it was important that UK politicians were “assertive” in holding Musk to account for the content on his platforms, noting that Musk was “taking a much more active and extreme role in British politics”.“Musk is a complex and extreme person. He’s an extremely successful innovator and commercialiser of innovation, but he also has extreme personal views,” Kyle said.xAI did not respond to a request for comment.Additional reporting by Jessica Elgot