Indonesia blocks Grok over non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes | TechCrunch

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

This is one of the most aggressive steps yet by government officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated images – often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes which shows that there has been abuse and assault — 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, Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs, 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 has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the matter.

Varied government responses in the past week include an order from India’s IT ministry for xAI 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, which could set the stage for an investigation.

In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom has said it will “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 has his “full support to take action.”

And while in the United States the Trump administration appears to be silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and headed the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year), Democratic senators have appealed to Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

xAI initially responded posting a seemingly personal apology to the Grok account, which acknowledges that a post “violates ethical standards and potentially U.S. laws” surrounding child sexual abuse material. Later, the AI ​​image generation feature was limited to paying subscribers to

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