Irish DPC brings emergency court proceedings against X over Grok training data

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) applied to the Irish High Court for an order requiring X to suspend its processing of EU and EEA users’ public posts for training Grok, xAI’s chatbot, marking the first time the regulator had used its Section 134 emergency powers under the Data Protection Act 2018. Those powers let the DPC seek urgent court intervention where it judges that ongoing processing poses an immediate risk to people’s data rights, bypassing the slower standard investigation and enforcement process.

The DPC’s concern centred on a window between 7 May and 1 August 2024, during which X had processed personal data contained in the public posts of EU and EEA users to train Grok without, in the regulator’s view, an adequate legal basis or sufficiently clear consent mechanism. As the lead supervisory authority for X under the EU’s one-stop-shop mechanism, the DPC was responsible for enforcing GDPR against the company across the bloc.

Rather than contest the application, X agreed to suspend the processing, and the DPC confirmed it welcomed that agreement in its 8 August statement. The regulator said the case would be struck out of the court list once the suspension took effect, since the emergency order it had sought was no longer necessary — a resolution reached without a substantive court ruling on whether X’s original data use had, in fact, breached the GDPR.

The episode set a template European regulators repeated with other AI developers over the following two years: rather than waiting for lengthy formal investigations to conclude, several data-protection authorities used emergency or precautionary powers to force AI companies to pause training on user data first and litigate the underlying legality afterwards, if at all.