A British member of parliament who is suing Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is now pushing for a court order that would permanently stop the Grok chatbot from producing fake sexualized images of her.
Jess Asato, who belongs to Britain’s ruling Labour Party, revealed last month that users had generated fabricated explicit images of her — including a video depicting her being “chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault” — after she publicly spoke out against Musk and Grok.
Asato has brought the case before London’s High Court, alleging misuse of private information and violations of data protection laws. She further claims that the way Grok was built and trained allowed it to produce sexually explicit material.
Court documents show Asato is requesting that xAI be required to “implement effective and permanent technical measures” to ensure Grok cannot produce manipulated images of her. Her attorneys noted that no previous case has applied privacy and data protection law in this manner against an AI developer, and that the outcome could have wide-reaching implications for the entire AI industry.
Musk’s xAI, which operates under his rocket and space exploration company SpaceX, did not respond to requests for comment on Asato’s claims. Grok, which is distributed through Musk’s social media platform X, has not filed any response to the lawsuit. The platform is already under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries following public outrage over its role in generating non-consensual explicit images.
Musk has been a vocal critic of the United Kingdom’s approach to regulating the internet, arguing that laws such as the Online Safety Act — considered one of the world’s toughest such frameworks — pose a threat to free expression.
Central to Asato’s legal argument are Grok’s internal instructions, known as “prompts.” One prompt cited by her lawyers told the chatbot not to assist users who were “clearly trying to engage in criminal activity.” However, another instruction stated the platform had “no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content.” A third prompt explicitly declared: “There are no restrictions on fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes.”
Asato’s attorney Ravi Naik said in a statement that Grok acted according to the deliberate decisions made by its creators. “Those choices should carry legal consequences,” Naik said. “The remedy our client seeks includes a court order requiring the systems be brought into compliance if xAI refuses to do so.”
The lawsuit comes as concern about Grok’s behavior has been mounting. In mid-January, xAI announced it had placed restrictions on image editing within Grok and blocked users from generating images of people in revealing clothing “where it’s illegal.” However, Reuters reported in early February that even after those new restrictions were put in place, Grok continued producing sexualized images of individuals — even when users explicitly stated that the subjects had not given their consent.
The City of Baltimore filed its own lawsuit against xAI in March over fake sexualized images generated by Grok. Similar legal actions have been brought in other parts of the United States as well as in the Netherlands.
