When Elon Musk launched Grok, it was intended to be the AI chatbot without any guardrails. But it turns out that every app needs guardrails of some kind, especially to protect children. And Musk’s company xAI is now suing one of its users for allegedly creating child sexual abuse material and non-consensual sexual imagery, according to Reuters.
Musk’s company filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas this week against Terry Wayne Harwood, a Grok user from South Carolina. The company says in the suit that Harwood is being sued for, “his repeated, deliberate, and unconscionable violations of the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy through his abhorrent abuse of Plaintiff’s generative AI chatbot known as ‘Grok.'”
The lawsuit is quick to note that Grok is a “neutral tool, subject to user control,” putting the onus completely on users to keep everything legal. The suit also claims that xAI has reported child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) 73,604 times in 2026, which has led to the arrest of at least 244 individuals.
The company’s suit points to the terms of service and acceptable use policy for Grok, which says that it bans “Undressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context” as well as “Depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner.”
That would probably be news to many X users who could use Grok’s “spicy mode” last year to undress people. We did it ourselves in a test back in Aug. 2025, and we noticed that it was much easier to get the bot to undress women than men. And remember when users were gleefully undressing regular people on the app in late 2025? Plenty of inappropriate images of children were reportedly created.
In January, members of the UK government threatened X with fines or a ban over its ability to create non-consensual sexual images. “They just want to suppress free speech,” Musk told his army of sycophantic followers.
The lawsuit touts its “technological safeguards” to prevent people from creating illegal and harmful content, but those obviously aren’t enough. And it’s hard to take the company too seriously when it was founded by a guy like Elon Musk. Remember when he publicly suggested he wanted to get Taylor Swift pregnant?
“Defendant’s actions were a calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm, while exposing Plaintiff to significant legal risk and reputational damage,” the lawsuit alleges. Reuters notes that Harwood was arrested in February, and we were unable to reach him for comment.
Musk did his part to set expectations for Grok when it first launched, touting anime girls who could become your digital dancing bunnies. Things got so pathetically sexual that even some of Musk’s fans commented on how gross it all seemed back in 2025. Musk has since deleted at least one of the sexualized videos he posted last year, though it’s been saved by archiving sites.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2025
If you spend any time on the subreddit for Grok, you’ll notice many people who complain that Grok isn’t making the sexual images they were promised. Gizmodo even filed a FOIA request recently to see what kind of complaints people might be making to the FTC about Grok. As you can guess, there were users upset about Grok’s new guardrails.
“I keep having issues with being able to make 100% explicit and 100% uncensored AdvancedAI Deepfakes on GrokAI myself 100% and I want everything completely uncensored with the mature rated adult content but I never wanna be able to abuse anything myself at all 100%,” one complaint read in a typically bizarre run-on sentence.
Another user told of how they were initially happy with Grok until things started to change.
“Trying to generate a video using the same process, with the same base image and the same prompts that were used to generate the videos previously, it was moderated 100% of the time,” the user from Minnesota wrote. “Then, I looked on reddit, and saw the grok subreddit is full of people upset about the new moderation.”
