Three U.S. Senators have asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to temporarily remove X and Grok from the App Store due to “sickening content generation” in recent days.
Senators Ron Wyden, Ed Markey, and Ben Ray Luján penned an open letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google, asking both companies to pull X and Grok apps “pending a full investigation” of “mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children.”
We write to ask that you enforce your app stores’ terms of service against X Corp’s (hereafter, “X”) X and Grok apps for their mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children. X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms. Apple and Google
must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed. In recent days, X users have used the app’s Grok AI tool to generate nonconsensual sexual imagery of real, private citizens at scale. This trend has included Grok modifying images to depict women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed. In some cases, Grok has reportedly created sexualized images of children—the most heinous type of content imaginable. What is more, X has reportedly encouraged this behavior, including through the company’s CEO Elon Musk acknowledging this trend with laugh-cry emoji reactions.
Notably, the letter points to Apple and Google recently pulling apps related to tracking Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity over government pressure as precedent for their request.
Both Apple and Google have also recently demonstrated the ability to move quickly to moderate apps from the app stores. For example, under explicit pressure, and perhaps threats, from the Department of Homeland Security, your companies quickly removed apps that allowed users to lawfully report immigration enforcement activities, like ICEBlock and Red Dot. Unlike Grok’s sickening content generation, these apps were not creating or hosting harmful or illegal content, and yet, based entirely on the Administration’s claims that they posed a risk to immigration enforcers, you removed them from your stores. We hope you will demonstrate a similar level of responsiveness and initiate swift action to remove the X and Grok apps from your app stores.
You can read the open letter in full here.