Indonesia blocks Grok over non-consensual sexual deepfakes

Indonesian authorities announced on Saturday that they were temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot Grok.

This is one of the most aggressive moves yet by government authorities in response to the flood of AI-generated sexual images (often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes showing assault and abuse) posted by Grok in response to requests from users on the social network X (X and xAI are part of the same company).

“The government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of the human rights, dignity and safety of citizens in the digital space,” Meutiya Hafid, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Digital, said in a statement shared with the Guardian and other publications.

The ministry also reportedly summoned X official to discuss the matter.

Various government actions over the past week, including India’s IT Ministry ordering xAI to take steps to stop Grok from producing obscene content, and the European Commission ordering xAI to preserve all documents related to Grok, could set the stage for an investigation.

In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom said it would “carry out a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues worth investigating”. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom had “full support to take action”.

And while the Trump administration appears to be silent on the issue in the US (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and last year led the controversial Department of Government Efficiency), Democratic senators are calling on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

xAI initially responded by posting a seemingly first-person apology on its Grok account, acknowledging that the post “violated ethical standards and potentially U.S. law” regarding its content regarding child sexual abuse. The AI ​​image generation feature was then restricted to paid subscribers of X, but that restriction didn’t seem to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.

“They want an excuse to censor,” Musk wrote in response to a post wondering why the UK government hasn’t taken action against other AI image generation tools.