Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says

Key Points:

• xAI is accused in a lawsuit of training its AI model Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), including images of a plaintiff, Jane Doe, who was a victim of abuse in the early 2000s and whose images have been hashed by organizations like NCMEC and CCCP.
• The complaint alleges that Grok not only used original CSAM but also AI-generated CSAM for training, and that Grok’s terms allow the model to train on public posts and its own outputs, potentially perpetuating harmful content.
• Doe’s lawsuit claims xAI violated federal child pornography laws and seeks class-action status to represent all victims whose images were used, demanding destruction of Grok-generated CSAM and a ban on Grok generating any sexualized content.
• The complaint highlights the difficulty of removing harmful training data from AI models once ingested and criticizes xAI for not explicitly excluding CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery, or NSFW material from its training datasets.
• xAI has not publicly responded to the allegations, and the case marks the first legal action accusing xAI of training on CSAM material.