The European Union has opened yet another investigation into X, this time targeting the platform’s Grok artificial intelligence system—marking the latest escalation in what is increasingly shaping up to be a coordinated, multinational pressure campaign against Elon Musk’s social media company.
EU regulators are demanding information about how Grok is trained, how it generates responses, and whether it complies with the bloc’s sweeping Digital Services Act (DSA). Officials claim the inquiry is focused on “risk mitigation” and “harmful content,” but the timing and framing closely mirror earlier moves by the UK government and its allies to rein in X over the same issue.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranded it to X, and wound down the regime of political censorship that previously dominated the platform, his company has faced ceaseless attacks from foreign regulators.
- In October 2024, X was banned in Brazil on orders from the country’s powerful judiciary, which proceeded to extract a $5.1 million fine before ending the digital blockade.
- X became the first platform investigated under the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the first to face a fine – approximately $142 million over the platform’s alleged failure to allow “disinformation researchers” to surveil the platform’s users at scale.
- Earlier this month, the UK government sought cooperation from Canada and Australia to jointly ban X across all three nations.
The EU’s new complaints, about Grok’s ability to create “sexualized” images of people mirror the pretext used by the UK earlier this month. Like the UK, EU officials have seemingly ignored the fact that other AI models have experienced the exact same issue — yet Grok and X remain the primary target of international regulators.
The EU action comes on the heels of an announcement earlier this month from Musk’s company, which said technical updates had been made to Grok so that it would prevent the model “from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis.” Today, X users can no longer prompt Grok to produce the same images that triggered the international controversy. The EU proceeded with its probe anyway.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers criticized the EU’s move.
“Deepfakes are a troubling, frontier issue that call for tailored, thoughtful responses,” Rogers said in a statement to the press.
“Erecting a ‘Great Firewall’ to ban X, or lobotomizing AI, is neither tailored nor thoughtful. We stand ready to work with the EU on better ideas.”
