Indonesia and Malaysia block Grok for non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes

Indonesian and Malaysian officials said they were temporarily blocking access to xAI’s Grok chatbot.

These are the most aggressive measures ever taken by government officials. responding to a flood of sexualized images generated by AI — often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes describing violence — posted by Grok in response to requests from users of the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)

In a statement shared on Saturday with the Guardian and other publications, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Digital, Meutya Hafid, said: “The government considers the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes to be a serious violation of the human rights, dignity and security of citizens in the digital space. »

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

The New York Times said the Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.

Varied government responses over the past week include an order from the Indian IT Ministry for xAI to take steps to prevent Grok from generating obscene content, as well as an order from the European Commission requiring the company to preserve all documents related to Grok, potentially paving the way for an investigation.

In the UK, Ofcom, the communications regulator, said it “will undertake a rapid assessment to determine whether there are any potential compliance issues which 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 remaining silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and led the administration’s controversial Department of Government Effectiveness last year), Democratic senators calls on Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

xAI initially responded with post an apology apparently in the first person to the Grok account, acknowledging that a post “violated ethical standards and potentially U.S. laws” regarding child sexual abuse material. Later restricts AI image generation functionality to paid subscribers on X, although this restriction did not appear to affect the Grok app itself, which still allowed anyone to generate images.

In response to an article questioning why the UK government was not taking action against other AI image generation tools, Musk wrote“They want any excuse for censorship.”

This post has been updated to reflect Malaysia’s ban on Grok.