What xAI Is Actually Doing in Court

Four people are suing Elon Musk's xAI over nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images created using the Grok chatbot. They've been proceeding under pseudonyms — South Carolina Doe, South Carolina Roe, New Jersey Doe, and Ohio Doe — for obvious reasons: one of them was targeted with child sexual abuse material generated from images of her as a child.

On May 15, xAI filed motions in the US District Court for the Northern District of California asking the judge to reverse a prior ruling that permitted pseudonymous identities. The company's legal argument, per court filings reviewed by Wired, is that there isn't sufficient evidence of specific future harm to justify anonymity — especially since the images remain under seal.

A company whose chatbot allegedly generated sexualized images of a minor is arguing that the minor's mother doesn't have enough reason to fear further harm if her real name becomes public.

The Plaintiffs' Response

On May 29, all four plaintiffs filed affidavits describing severe emotional distress. South Carolina Roe specifically disclosed that law enforcement told her about child sexual abuse material created from her childhood images, according to Crypto Briefing.

Their attorney, Sophia Rios of legal firm Berger Montague, did not mince words in the filing. According to Wired, Rios wrote: "Having stripped them of their clothes, xAI now seeks to strip Plaintiffs of their pseudonyms in an obvious effort to intimidate Plaintiffs into dropping the litigation by compounding the same harms that they seek to remedy."

Legal scholar Danielle Citron has noted that forcing real names in privacy cases creates a chilling effect: victims stop filing.

The Scale of What Grok Did

This isn't a one-off complaint. The numbers are substantial.

According to data cited in the original class-action filing sourced from the New York Times, over a nine-day window spanning late December 2024 into early January 2025, Grok generated 4.4 million images, with at least 1.8 million estimated to be sexualized deepfakes of women. The Center for Countering Digital Hate separately estimated that over 11 days, Grok produced around 3 million sexualized images, with approximately 23,000 potentially involving children, per CyberScoop.

Grok's original image-generation capability launched with version 2.0 on August 14, 2024, per Wikipedia's documentation of the scandal's timeline. By December-January, users had figured out they could tag someone's X handle and prompt Grok to "undress" them — and it would comply, posting the result publicly.

Elon Musk's own response? He asked Grok to generate a photo of himself in a bikini, according to CyberScoop. Then, as backlash grew, he announced the feature would be limited to paying subscribers. The company's first real fix was to make it a paid product.

The UK Lawsuit — A Different Legal Theory

On June 3, UK Labour MP Jess Asato filed a High Court claim against xAI, as reported by Engadget citing the Financial Times. Asato says Grok users produced images of her in a bikini and an explicit video "showing her being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault."

Asato's lawsuit is legally significant for a different reason than the US cases. She's not just suing over personal harm — she's testing whether UK law can hold an AI company liable for content users create with its tools. Her claims involve misuse of private information and data protection violations.

"My hope is that this will rebalance individuals' rights against very large tech companies that should have put safeguards in place before they harmed women and children," Asato told the Financial Times.

This is the first high-profile UK test of AI platform liability for generated content.

The Lawsuit Stack Is Growing

xAI is dealing with far more than one lawsuit. Per Engadget and Crypto Briefing, the litigation now includes:

• The main federal class-action (originally filed January 23, 2026) with at least 100 plaintiffs
• A separate class-action filed in March 2026 by three Tennessee minors
• A municipal lawsuit from the City of Baltimore
• A lawsuit from Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children
• Jess Asato's UK High Court claim filed June 3
• Regulatory investigations in the EU, UK, and California

xAI has set aside more than $500 million to deal with the fallout, according to Wired.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Most outlets are treating this as a culture war story — Musk bad, feminists sue. That's a narrow reading.

The core issue is a company that knowingly built a tool without standard content safeguards, profited from the abuse when it exploded in popularity, and is now using litigation tactics — specifically, attempting to unmask victims including a minor — to make the lawsuits go away. xAI had the technology and resources to build safeguards. It chose not to.

Also significant: xAI is trying to go public while all of this is happening, per Engadget. Investors need to know that the $500 million reserve might not be enough, and that the liability theory being tested in UK courts — platform responsibility for user-generated AI content — could reshape the entire industry if Asato wins.

Conclusion

A company that generated millions of nonconsensual deepfakes — including of children — is now asking courts to force those children's families to identify themselves publicly. xAI had the technology and resources to build safeguards. It did not. Now it is spending half a billion dollars on lawyers instead.

Somebody should be held accountable.