Minors Sue xAI in California Over Alleged Grok Deepfake Images

Three Tennessee minors have sued Elon Musk’s xAI in a federal class action, alleging that Grok generated child sexual abuse material using their real photos and that the company knowingly designed its AI chatbot without industry-standard safeguards, then profited from the result.

The court casefiled Monday in the Northern District of California, alleging that Grok was used to create and distribute AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) using their real images.

The minors, identified as Jane Doe 1, 2 and 3, said the altered content was shared on various platforms including Discord, Telegram and file-sharing sites, causing lasting emotional distress and reputational damage.

“xAI – and its founder Elon Musk – saw a business opportunity: a chance to profit from the sexual predation of real people, including children,” the lawsuit reads. “Knowing the kind of harmful, illegal content that could and could be produced, XAI released Grok, a generative artificial intelligence model with image and video creation features that would respond to prompts to create sexual content using a person’s real image or video.”

The alleged victims describe incidents between mid-2025 and early 2026 in which their real photos were turned into explicit images and circulated online.

In one case, one of the victims was alerted by an anonymous user who found folders containing AI-generated content being traded between hundreds of users.

They allege that a perpetrator gained access to Grok through a third-party application that licensed xAI’s technology, a structure that the filing alleges xAI deliberately used to distance itself from liability while continuing to profit from its underlying model.

At the height of the public backlash in January, Musk said wrote on X that he was “not aware of any nude images of minors,” adding that “when asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal.”

According to a finding by the Center for Countering Digital Hate cited in the lawsuit, Grok estimated to be produced 23,338 sexualized images of children between December 29, 2025 and January 9 of this year, approximately one every 41 seconds.

The alleged victims are seeking damages of at least $150,000 per violation under Masha’s Law, along with disgorgement, compensatory damages, attorneys’ fees and a permanent injunction, as well as restitution of profits under California’s unfair competition law.

The lawsuits are piling up

The lawsuit is one of the first to hold an AI company directly liable for the alleged production and distribution of AI-generated CSAM depicting identifiable minors. US., EU, Great Britain, France, IrelandAnd Australia.

“When a system is deliberately designed to manipulate real images into sexualized content, the downstream abuse is not an anomaly – it is a predictable outcome,” even Alex Chandra, a partner at IGNOS Law Alliance, told Declutter.

Chandra said courts may not accept a simple platform defense, noting that a generative AI system “could be treated as a platform in terms of user interaction” but “evaluated as a product” when assessing safety design, with “particularly strict scrutiny” applied in CSAM cases due to increased child protection obligations.

He also said courts are likely to focus on safety measures, noting that the company should be expected to demonstrate “risk assessments and safety-by-design measures before deployment, along with guardrails that actively block harmful output.”

Declutter has contacted Musk for comment through xAI and SpaceX.