Elon Musk faces EU probe over Grok AI's 'undressing' feature
Photo by Zulfugar Karimov (unsplash.com/@zulfugarkarimov) on Unsplash
'The European Union on Tuesday opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s xAI over its Grok chatbot’s ‘undressing’ feature, citing potential violations of the bloc’s new Digital Services Act.
'The European Union on Tuesday opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s xAI over its Grok chatbot’s ‘undressing’ feature, citing potential violations of the bloc’s new Digital Services Act.
The investigation, announced by the European Commission, centers on a feature within the Grok AI chatbot that allegedly generated millions of nonconsensual, sexualized deepfake images, including of women and children. The probe will determine if the feature, often described as an ‘undressing’ tool, violates the **Digital Services Act (DSA)**, the EU’s stringent new online content moderation law. This marks one of the most high-profile tests of the regulation’s enforcement capabilities since it came into full effect.
The development comes amid a period of intense activity for Musk’s various ventures. According to a report by The Verge cited on Fosstodon, Musk is considering a merger between his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, and his aerospace company, **SpaceX**. This potential consolidation, as also covered by Gizmodo, is seen as a move to bolster financial resources and compete more aggressively in the rapidly evolving AI sector, particularly against rivals like OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Simultaneously, Musk is pushing his other companies toward an AI-centric future. As reported by Fosstodon, during a recent Tesla earnings call where the company topped analyst estimates, Musk announced plans to spend $20 billion on capital expenditures, with a heavy focus on robotics and AI. This shift in strategy was so pronounced that, according to The Independent, Tesla killed production of two of its most famous car models to focus on what Musk called the ‘biggest product of all time’—the Optimus humanoid robot. However, this pivot has drawn skepticism from experts like MIT roboticist R. Brooks, who called the timeline for a general-purpose robot “pure fantasy thinking.”
Further underscoring the scale of Musk’s ambition, WCCFtech reported on his ‘TeraFab’ project, a massive facility intended to combine memory, chips, and packaging under one roof. Musk claimed this vertical integration is the only way to achieve the scale needed for future AI and robotics development.
The EU’s investigation into Grok presents a direct challenge to these ambitions. The DSA imposes massive fines for violations, which can reach up to 6% of a company’s global annual turnover. The probe will scrutinize whether xAI’s content moderation practices and the very design of the ‘undressing’ feature failed to mitigate systemic risks, as required by the law. Media Faro reported that while the launch of the investigation is a positive signal for regulators, doubts remain over how far the European Commission is ultimately willing to go in a confrontation with Musk.
The outcome could set a major precedent for how powerful generative AI tools are regulated in Europe, potentially forcing significant changes to how they are built and deployed. It also introduces a new layer of regulatory risk for Musk’s interconnected business empire as it seeks to dominate the next generation of technology.