British lawmaker Jess Asato has sued Elon Musk’s xAI in London, accusing the company’s Grok chatbot of helping generate fake sexualised images of her without consent.
Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, a coastal constituency in Suffolk, brought the claim in the High Court, alleging xAI breached data protection rules and misused private information by allowing users on X to prompt Grok into producing the images, according to the Financial Times.
MP says images were ‘violating‘
Asato said the images first came to her attention in January, when Grok depicted her in a bikini without consent, a portrayal she described as “violating,” before also generating a video “showing her being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault.”
Lawsuit puts AI accountability in focus
The case could help define where responsibility sits when generative AI tools are used to create abusive content, raising questions over whether companies can avoid liability by pointing to the users who entered the prompts.
“My hope is that this will rebalance individuals’ rights against very large tech companies that should have put safeguards in place before they harmed women and children,” Asato said.
Her lawyer, Ravi Naik, said the case was rooted in the responsibilities of developers that design and release AI products to the public.
“At its heart this case is about a single principle: that developers must answer for the way they design and deploy their tools,” he told the newspaper.
Naik said the dispute also raises a central question over whether an AI-generated image made to resemble a person should be treated as an image of that person. “xAI say otherwise,” he said.
Grok already under EU scrutiny
The lawsuit comes after months of scrutiny over Grok in Europe, where regulators have been examining whether X did enough to prevent the chatbot from enabling the spread of illegal sexualized deepfakes.
The European Commission opened a formal investigation into X on January 26 under the Digital Services Act, saying it would assess whether the platform properly evaluated and reduced risks tied to Grok’s rollout in the EU, including the circulation of manipulated sexually explicit images and material that could amount to child sexual abuse content.
European lawmakers also moved directly into the debate, with the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee holding a May hearing on “AI, gender-based violence including sexual images of women and children: the case of Grok,” as lawmakers examined sexually explicit AI deepfakes involving women and minors and considered whether AI editing tools need tougher restrictions.
Court orders and platform restrictions
Pressure has also spread beyond Brussels, with a Dutch court ordering xAI and Grok in March to stop generating or distributing non-consensual sexualized images in the Netherlands, while xAI said it had restricted Grok’s image-editing features in regions where such content is illegal.
Asato’s claim now brings the wider controversy into the UK courts, adding legal pressure to a debate that has moved beyond content moderation and into the design choices behind consumer AI tools.