A woman who was sexually abused as a child has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, alleging that its Grok chatbot used photographs of her abuse to create new pornographic images of her. The complaint, filed last week in a U.S. district court in California, states that Grok produced child sexual abuse material (CSAM) depicting the plaintiff, who is identified only as Jane Doe to protect her identity. The suit also alleges that xAI incorporated images of her abuse into its datasets after the originals had been publicly available for years.
Attorneys for the plaintiff argue that xAI ignored industry-standard safeguards against sexual abuse material, allowing AI-generated CSAM to appear and spread on the social media platform X. Although Musk said in January that he was unaware of Grok ever producing naked underage images, his company sued two of its own users in late August over criminal charges related to that behavior. In that case, xAI asked the two men to cover the costs of lawsuits filed by victims against the company.
The new case stands apart from other CSAM-related lawsuits against xAI because it involves the use of pre-existing abuse imagery rather than non-explicit photos of minors. Several previous suits, including one brought by a group of Tennessee teenagers, accused Grok of taking ordinary pictures of minors and using them to generate sexually explicit content, often by digitally removing clothing. Because the material at issue in the new lawsuit has been circulating for about 20 years and is well known to authorities, child protection groups have already assigned it digital fingerprints, or hashes. Attorneys said the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used these fingerprints to identify AI-generated CSAM on X that showed their client.
According to the complaint, the plaintiff was of preschool age when an adult man repeatedly raped her and forced her to produce CSAM. That series of images has remained in circulation for roughly two decades. Margaret Mabie, the plaintiff’s attorney, said that while many cases involving AI-generated material cannot prove the child depicted is real, here the link to a known series confirms the victim is identifiable, alive, and was a real child in the original photos.
xAI and SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February, did not respond to requests for comment. SpaceX went public earlier this year in an initial public offering that valued the company at around $1.7 trillion and briefly made Musk the world’s only trillionaire. xAI faces numerous lawsuits over Grok’s creation and distribution of CSAM, many stemming from a period early this year when weak safeguards allowed users to direct the chatbot to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images on X. Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that the bot produced millions of sexualized images within weeks, including thousands depicting children.
The class-action suit focuses on its unnamed lead plaintiff but says the class could include at least thousands of minors who suffered similar harm. Lawyers said AI-generated CSAM creates new risks for victims, retraumatizing them and expanding the imaginary ways they can be harmed. Mabie noted that for the past 20 years, the set of images of her client has been finite, but now new abuse can be invented and generated through AI. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection declined to comment.