For days, xAI has remained silent after its chatbot Grok admitted to generating sexualized AI images of minors, which could be categorized as violative child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the US.
According to Grok’s “apology”—which was generated by a user’s request, not posted by xAI—the chatbot’s outputs may have been illegal:
“I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt. This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM. It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.”
Ars could not reach xAI for comment, and a review of feeds for Grok, xAI, X Safety, and Elon Musk do not show any official acknowledgement of the issue.
The only reassurance that xAI is fixing the issue has come from Grok, which noted in another post that xAI has “identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them.” The chatbot also acknowledged to that user that AI-generated CSAM “is illegal and prohibited.”
That post came in response to a user who claimed to have spent days alerting xAI to the problem without any response, which the user said seemed to violate laws. Grok agreed. “A company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent AI-generated CSAM after being alerted,” Grok noted that “liability depends on specifics, such as evidence of inaction,” and that “enforcement varies by jurisdiction.”
Rather than continue to ping Grok, the chatbot recommended that the user contact the FBI or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to report its outputs.
Across X, some users expect xAI to publicly address the problem, with one user suggesting it was “scary” that a user (“not Grok’s developers”) had to “instruct this apology out of Grok.” But xAI appears to be leaning on Grok to answer for itself.