Published : 06 Sep 2026, 12:03 AM
Updated : 16 Sep 2026, 11:47 AM
A survivor of child sexual abuse is suing Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, alleging its Grok chatbot used real images of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic material depicting her.
The complaint, filed last week in a California federal court, accuses xAI of both producing AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) of the plaintiff and ingesting pre-existing abuse images into its datasets after they were publicly posted online.
The plaintiff, identified only as Jane Doe, was preschool-aged when she was repeatedly assaulted and forced to produce CSAM, reports The Guardian.
That series of images has circulated online for roughly two decades and is well known to authorities and child protection groups.
Attorneys say the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used digital fingerprinting technology -- which assigns unique identifiers to known illegal images -- to trace AI-generated material on X back to their client.
The case stands apart from other CSAM-related lawsuits against xAI. Earlier suits, including one involving Tennessee teenagers, allege Grok generated abuse material from ordinary photos of minors.
This complaint alleges the AI worked from pre-existing illegal images -- a distinction that makes victim identification possible.
"The fear now is that new criminal acts, new offensive behaviour, new ideas of what can be done to them can now be created using AI," said the plaintiff's attorney Margaret Mabie.
xAI is battling multiple lawsuits over CSAM.
The company's troubles stem largely from a period earlier this year when weak safeguards allowed users to direct Grok to strip clothing from photos and generate sexualised images on demand.
Researchers say the bot produced millions of such images within weeks, thousands depicting children.
The company sued two of its own users in late August who face criminal charges for allegedly generating such material, and is seeking to recover the legal costs their victims have claimed against xAI.
Parent company SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did xAI.
The class-action suit could represent thousands of minors, attorneys say.
