Tennessee teens sue Elon Musk’s xAI over child sexual abuse images

Tennessee teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s company xAI over allegations that its artificial intelligence tool Grok undressed photos of them as minors—the latest challenge against the wealthiest living person’s chatbot. 

The three plaintiffs, two of whom are currently minors, are seeking damages after AI-generated images of them spread across Discord and Telegram and were eventually used as bartering tools for users to obtain other child sexual abuse material, according to the complaint detailed in new Washington Post reporting. 

“xAI—and its founder Elon Musk,” the complaint reads, “saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.”

One of the plaintiffs said she received a link to a Discord server “which contained images and videos of at least 18 other minor females, many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognized from her school,” the lawsuit alleges. 

Some of the images stemmed from her homecoming or yearbook photos. 

The lawsuit comes after months of backlash against Musk’s chatbot after the company allowed Grok to undress people nonconsensually using the “Imagine” tool. The complaint argues that a “model that can create sexualized images of adults cannot be prevented from creating CSAM of minors.” According to earlier reporting from the Post, Grok’s previous leniency towards fulfilling users’ sexually explicit requests was a marketing technique, meant to increase the popularity of the chatbot. 

Musk and his company didn’t respond to the Post in their coverage of the Tennessee lawsuit. Musk has repeatedly placed responsibility onto the individual users requesting such content and has held that Grok “will refuse to produce anything illegal,” despite the chatbot itself, in at least one instance, posting that its actions might have violated the 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation criminalizing the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.

According to an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok generated approximately 3 million sexualized images in just an 11-day period, from December 29 to January 8. Around 23,000 of those, according to researchers, appeared to depict children. In a January 14 post, Musk claimed that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”

Later than month, 35 state attorneys general penned a letter to xAI demanding the company “take all necessary measures to ensure that Grok is no longer capable of producing” this kind of nonconsensual sexual imagery and child sexual abuse material. The European Union and regulators in the United Kingdom and California have launched investigations into Grok. 

In January, following rising international ethical and legal objections to the mass spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery, some of Grok’s Imagine image generation features were limited to paid X users. Yet Grok image tools are still seemingly offered for free on the standalone website and application. And even if restricting elements of the service to paying users could limit the quantity of material, introducing a nominal fee for those hoping to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people, including minors, doesn’t answer a key legal question: Will Grok be meaningfully changed to protect women and girls from this kind of digital abuse?

The Tennessee teens are just some of the scores of girls and women impacted by Grok’s undressing, reportedly including at least one woman who Musk knows personally. 

Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator who has a child with Musk, said that Grok created nonconsensual sexual imagery of her. Some of the images, according to an interview she did with NBC News, were from when St. Clair was a minor. 

Annika K. Martin, the lead counsel in the suit, had a question for Musk as a father:

“Your child’s voice on video screaming. Can you imagine that as a parent?” she asked. “Can you imagine that for your child and feel okay with what you’ve done?”