Brussels announced a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot after researchers and watchdogs revealed the tool could be prompted to produce sexualized images of real people, including children. The European Commission said it was launching the inquiry under the Digital Services Act to assess whether X and Grok properly assessed and mitigated the risks of generating illegal and abusive content.
This probe focuses squarely on whether X’s AI features allowed “digital undressing” and other manipulations that amount to non-consensual sexual deepfakes, and whether those harms were treated as collateral damage. EU officials have framed the case as a test of whether powerful tech platforms will be held accountable when their tools enable exploitation and child sexual abuse material.
Independent analyses have painted an alarming picture of scale: investigations reported millions of sexualized images created in short order, raising questions about how quickly harmful AI content can proliferate once a tool is unleashed. Those numbers forced a reckoning about whether companies rushed products to market without adequate guardrails or serious human oversight.
X and its parent companies have scrambled to respond, limiting Grok’s image functions to paying accounts and introducing filters intended to block edits of real people in revealing clothing, but regulators say those steps were too little, too late. The company insists it has zero tolerance for exploitation and has pointed to new technological restrictions, yet critics note the measures were reactive rather than preventive.
European authorities are not approaching this in a vacuum: X already faces a December fine of 120 million euros under the same rules for unrelated transparency breaches, which feeds the broader narrative of regulatory pressure on American tech firms. Whether those fines are fair accountability or heavy-handed punishment will be debated, but the pattern is clear—Brussels is willing to wield aggressive enforcement tools against platforms it sees as falling short.
Conservatives should do two things at once: condemn the vile exploitation these tools can enable and demand clear legal accountability for criminals who produce and distribute illegal material, while also warning against regulatory campaigns that stifle innovation and weaponize vague rules to punish successful U.S. companies. Europe’s rush to punish risks creating a patchwork of standards that will hand advantage to authoritarian regimes or adversaries that don’t care about open markets or free expression.
This moment calls for sober, muscle-minded solutions: prosecute and punish the abusers, invest in real technical fixes that stop AI from creating non-consensual explicit content, and preserve the freedoms that drive innovation. Conservatives can and should lead on both fronts—protecting the vulnerable while pushing back hard on regulatory overreach that threatens American ingenuity and digital freedom.
