Elon Musk's AI company xAI has filed a lawsuit against a South Carolina man, alleging he misused its chatbot Grok to generate child sexual abuse material. The case, filed in federal court in Texas, is thought to be one of the first brought by an AI company against a user for allegedly exploiting its tool to create such material, and comes amid growing global scrutiny of xAI over claims that Grok has enabled the creation of non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.

The lawsuit names Terry Harwood, who was arrested in February on charges of sexually exploiting minors, and accuses him of breaching xAI's terms of service by uploading non-sexual images of adults and children to Grok in an attempt to generate explicit deepfakes, as well as creating non-consensual sexual imagery of adults. xAI is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a permanent court order barring Harwood from using Grok, saying his actions amounted to "a calculated scheme to weaponize" the tool. The company said it reports suspected abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and enforces its rules through account suspensions and terminations.