Australia's eSafety Commissioner raises concerns over Grok generating sexualised images
The regulator wrote to X after reports rose from almost none to several; some cases were reviewed for child exploitation but did not meet the legal threshold to act.
- Security & misuse
- Culture & impact
- Notable
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, wrote to X seeking information on what safeguards the platform had in place to stop its Grok chatbot being used to sexualise or exploit people in images, particularly children. The regulator said reports of this kind had risen from almost none to several over the preceding weeks — a small absolute number, it said, but a notable escalation — and that some cases had been reviewed for potential child exploitation, though none had yet met the legal threshold under Australia’s Online Safety Act for eSafety to act. The Commissioner said the agency would use its enforcement powers “where appropriate and where material meets the relevant thresholds.”
The intervention came alongside action by regulators in several other jurisdictions examining the same conduct. The European Commission, which had called the material “illegal,” “appalling” and “disgusting,” ordered X to preserve internal documents and data related to Grok through the end of 2026. The UK’s Ofcom separately demanded X explain how Grok had produced the images and, days later, opened a formal investigation into whether X had breached its legal duties, warning of possible fines or restrictions. X announced on 14 January that Grok would no longer be permitted to edit images of real people into revealing clothing such as bikinis.
The episode extended into 2026 a pattern of harmful outputs from xAI’s Grok Imagine tool that had first drawn scrutiny the previous August, and became one of the more visible tests of how multiple national regulators would coordinate — or fail to coordinate — against a single AI product’s misuse across jurisdictions with different legal thresholds for intervention. eSafety had already taken enforcement action against several “nudify” apps in 2025, and new Australian codes due to take effect in March 2026 were set to create fresh obligations on AI services to limit children’s access to sexually explicit material.