Indonesia blocks Grok for non-consensual, sexually deep fakes

Indonesian officials said on Saturday they were temporarily blocking access to xAI’s Grok chatbot.

This is one of the most aggressive moves yet by government officials responding to a flood of sexualized AI-generated images — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes shows assault and abuse — posted by Grok in response to user requests on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)

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

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

The varied government responses in the past week include an order by India’s IT ministry for xAI to take steps to prevent Grok from creating obscene content, as well as an order from the European Commission for the company to retain all documents related to Grok, which could form the basis of an investigation.

In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom said it would “conduct a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation”. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview that Ofcom had “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 Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

xAI Originally Answered by posting an apparently first-person apology on the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially US law” regarding child sexual abuse material. It later restricted the ability to create AI images to paying subscribers to X, though this restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to create images.

In response to a post questioning why the UK government hasn’t taken action against other AI imaging tools, Musk wrote“They want any excuse for censorship.”