xAI sues Grok user over explicit deepfakes of minors

Elon Musk’s xAI has taken a South Carolina man to federal court in Texas, accusing him of using the Grok chatbot to create sexually explicit deepfakes of minors, marking the very first time an AI company will sue one of its own users over content generated using its platform.

The defendant, Terry Harwood, was arrested in February on separate charges of sexually exploiting minors, according to Reuters. xAI’s civil complaint was filed on Tuesday April 14, and will now be alongside whatever criminal case develops from that arrest.

xAI’s lawsuit

The filing says that he opened several accounts under fake identities, and then fed the AI tool regular photographs of both adults and children before writing prompts meant to turn those images into sexual content. According to Al Jazeera, the subjects used in these acts had not consented and did not know their pictures were being used.

xAI claims the system pushed back against the act. Grok refused the requests, flagging them as violations of its content rules. Harwood’s response, according to the complaint, was to keep rewriting the prompts and trying again.

“Defendant’s actions were a calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm,” xAI wrote in the lawsuit, quoted by Reuters. The company also alleges he produced non-consensual sexual images of adults.

The AI company requested two things from the court in the lawsuit filing. These include monetary damages with no particular figure attached, and an order that bars Harwood from ever using the Grok product again.

xAI also used the filing to state the scale of its enforcement work against bad actors. The company said it suspended 52,222 accounts this year and sent 73,604 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, referrals that led to at least 244 arrests in 2026.

Grok remains under wider scrutiny

xAI had already been under pressure over what Grok can produce before this case came up. Regulators in Europe have scrutinized the AI tool, while lawmakers in Washington have raised multiple concerns. Both Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the chatbot due to sexually explicit output, Al Jazeera reported.

Elon Musk himself denied the underlying problem earlier this year. “I [am] not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” he wrote on X in January.

I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.

Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.

When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle… https://t.co/YBoqo7ZmEj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2026

A recently created legal pathway called the DEFIANCE Act has also led to an increase in these such cases. The act, signed in 2024, gives victims of non-consensual intimate deepfakes a way to sue, and several states have passed individual laws to this effect.

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