Elon Musk's X offices in Paris were searched by French police on Tuesday, and prosecutors summoned the tech billionaire to appear for questioning in April as part of an investigation into alleged distribution of sexually explicit deepfakes and Holocaust denial content, NBC News reported. Employees of the French prosecutor's cybercrime unit, in partnership with the French police's own cybercrime unit and Europol, the EU's central law enforcement agency, conducted the search.
According to NBC, prosecutors want Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, who resigned in July 2025, to appear for questioning the week of April 20.
A representative for X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
"The voluntary interviews with the managers should enable them to explain their position on the facts and, where applicable, the compliance measures envisaged," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
According to the report, prosecutors are investigating possible complicity in the possession and distribution of child pornography images and the generation of sexual deepfakes. Prosecutors said they are also investigating alleged denial of "crimes against humanity" and the fraudulent extraction of data from an automated processing system.
Deepfakes are falsified videos that make it appear that a person is doing or saying something they didn't do.
Also on Tuesday, Reuters reported that the UK's Information Commissioner's Office -- an independent watchdog designed to ensure data privacy and enforce data protection laws -- launched an investigation into the xAI chatbot Grok after reports that it had been used to generate sexual imagery of individuals, including children, without consent.
Grok is a free-to-use chatbot developed by xAI, an artificial intelligence company founded by Musk in 2023. Much like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Grok is designed to answer people's questions, assist with tasks, generate and summarize content, and perform other functions. But in January, the chatbot made global headlines and sparked outrage after it was widely used to create non-consensual sexualized images of real people, including minors, in threads on Musk's social-media platform, X.
"At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory," the prosecutor's office in Paris said.
Both the Paris raid and the UK's new investigation come on the heels of a probe begun last week by the European Union, which will try to determine if X disseminated illegal content -- also prompted by the accusations that people were able to generate sexualized imagery on Grok.
... continue reading