Indonesia blocks Grok over non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes

Officials from Indonesia and Malaysia have said they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot Grok.

These are the most aggressive moves so far from government officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated imagery — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes depicting violence — posted by Grok in response to requests from users on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)

In a statement shared Saturday with the Guardian and other publications, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister Meutya Hafid said, “The 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.”

The ministry has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the issue.

The Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.

Varied governmental responses over the past week include an order from India’s IT ministry for X 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, potentially setting the stage for an investigation.

In the United Kingdom, the communications regulator Ofcom has said that it will “undertake a swift assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom has his “full support to take action.”

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’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year), Democratic senators have called on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

XAI initially responded by posting a seemingly first-person apology to the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws” around child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, though that restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.

In response to a post wondering why the U.K. government wasn’t taking action against other AI image generation tools, Musk wrote, “They want any excuse for censorship.”

This post was first published on January 11. It has been updated to reflect Malaysia’s ban on Grok.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

Scale faster. Grow your portfolio. Gain practical expertise. No matter your goal, Disrupt can empower you.Save up to $330 today!

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

SpaceX launches new V3 Starlink satellites but suffers another booster failure

Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M

US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

Anduril reportedly in talks to raise funding at $100B valuation, more than 3x last year’s mark

OpenAI makes ChatGPT Health available to all US users