Trending 
French prosecutors said on Saturday they had informed US authorities of suspicions that tech entrepreneur Elon Musk may have fuelled controversy surrounding sexualised deepfakes on X in order to “artificially” increase the company’s value.
The platform’s Grok chatbot sparked outrage earlier this year after generating images of naked women and girls without their consent.
“The controversy sparked by sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok (X’s AI) may have been deliberately generated in order to artificially boost the value of companies X and xAI,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said, confirming a report by Le Monde.
It added that this may have been linked to “the planned June 2026 stock market listing of the new entity created by the merger” between SpaceX and xAI.
The prosecutor’s office said it had contacted both the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier in the week to share its concerns.
Responding on X in French to coverage of the case, Musk criticised French prosecutors as “mentally retarded.”
French authorities are already examining X over allegations that its algorithm was used to interfere in domestic politics, as well as concerns about Grok’s dissemination of Holocaust denial content and sexualised deepfakes.
For a time, users could tag the chatbot in posts to request image generation or edits, receiving results directly in replies. Many used the feature to generate altered images of women, prompting the system with instructions such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.
A report by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate estimated that around three million sexualised images were produced in just 11 days, most depicting women, including approximately 23,000 that appeared to involve children.
According to reporting cited by The Washington Post, global daily downloads of the Grok app rose by 72 per cent between 1 January and 19 January compared with the same period in December, based on data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
French authorities last month summoned Musk for a “voluntary interview” and carried out searches at the French offices of X, actions he described as a “political attack”.
Investigations into the creation of such sexualised deepfakes have also been launched in both the European Union and the United Kingdom.
