Wired Finds Grok Still Generating Sexualized Deepfakes Days Before SpaceX IPO. A Times Square Protest Followed.

Since the Grok nudification scandal surfaced in January 2026, xAI has repeatedly said it introduced safeguards. Those claims are now under renewed scrutiny.

Wired conducted an analysis of hundreds of public Grok Imagine links hosted on Grok.com and found dozens led to sexualized AI images and videos of identifiable women, including celebrities and at least one politician. Some were photorealistic. Some depicted subjects in scenarios involving physical restraint or sexual acts. The content appeared to have been created without the subjects' consent. After Wired contacted xAI and X for comment, the specific links went dark. Neither company publicly responded to explain what happened or why the content existed in the first place.

What xAI Said It Did

Following the January backlash, xAI stated publicly that it had introduced restrictions on nonconsensual and sexualized deepfake generation. The company has consistently maintained that child sexual abuse material is banned on its platform. Those statements were the public record as of Wednesday, June 11, 2026.

Henry Ajder, a deepfake researcher who has tracked explicit AI content for nearly a decade, told Wired: "While Grok and X may have made some amendments to their model, particularly following the backlash around nudification at the beginning of the year, they still have not done a sufficient job to bring it up to the standard of the other mainstream tools that are available."

The Protest and the IPO Timing

On Wednesday, the group Safe AI Now (SAIN) erected a large inflatable effigy of Musk in Times Square, directly in front of the Nasdaq building and JP Morgan offices. JP Morgan is one of the banks participating in the SpaceX IPO. SAIN describes itself as a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, and legal professionals.

Attendants handed out flyers but would not speak on camera. A SAIN representative, speaking anonymously to Wired citing fear of retaliation, said: "This IPO is a liability shift. Elon is responsible for all of this. All of those litigation expenses, regulatory fines, investigations, all of that is basically being shifted to the shareholders."

That is an allegation, not a legal finding. No court has ruled on it.

SpaceX is set to debut on the stock market Friday. According to Wired, SpaceX is currently valued at $1.77 trillion, which would make it the largest company ever to go public at that valuation, priced at $135 per share. Musk would retain majority voting power under the IPO structure. The offering could also position Musk to become the world's first trillionaire depending on share performance.

The Legal and Regulatory Backdrop

The xAI/Grok controversy predates this week. The European Commission announced in January it was investigating xAI to assess whether the company properly evaluated risks related to nonconsensual sexual imagery. In January, 35 state attorneys general signed an open letter demanding guardrails. In March, three girls filed a class-action lawsuit in California federal court, alleging Grok's technology was used to generate sexualized images of them.

In February, Musk announced SpaceX was acquiring xAI, the move that SAIN and its allies argue made SpaceX the legal and financial heir to those liabilities.

The Strongest Counterargument

The case for xAI deserves a fair hearing before concluding the company is acting in bad faith. Generative AI content moderation is genuinely hard. Every major platform, including Google, Meta, and Microsoft, has faced repeated failures to prevent explicit AI-generated content despite significant investment in safety systems. The fact that Grok lagged behind competitors is a legitimate criticism, but it does not automatically make the company uniquely malicious rather than underresourced or slow-moving on safety. xAI's decision to remove the specific content Wired flagged after being contacted could indicate a reactive moderation system, which is a real problem, but it is different from a deliberate policy of allowing such content. The company's stated position that CSAM is banned, combined with Ajder's acknowledgment that some amendments were made, suggests a partial response to criticism rather than a complete non-response.

None of that, however, explains why photorealistic sexualized deepfakes of named real women were still publicly accessible months after xAI said it fixed the problem.

What Happens Next

SpaceX has not publicly addressed whether the Grok liability exposure, including the ongoing California class-action and the European Commission investigation, was disclosed in IPO filings available to prospective investors. That is the specific question neither Wired's reporting nor xAI's silence has answered as of June 11, 2026. Prospective shareholders considering a $135-per-share entry point in the world's largest-ever IPO debut do not yet know the full scope of what they may be inheriting.