Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Plaintiffs are seeking a class action case against SpaceXAI. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. More stories of Grok generating sexually explicit images add heft to federal court case. Elon Musk-owned SpaceXAI is set to defend its artificial intelligence bot Grok in federal court, following a scandal that alleges the AI assistant was used to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) . In March, three Tennessee teenagers filed a federal lawsuit against the company for its alleged role in producing millions of sexually explicit images of minors, claiming malicious actors used the AI tool to generate inappropriate images of them when they were children.

A fourth party is pursuing legal action against xAI, alleging that Grok was used to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) based on her childhood photos. As first reported by Washington Post, the woman, named as Jane Doe 4 in the lawsuit, said that her stepfather used Grok to create "thousands of sexually explicit images of her as a child and traded them online." According to the the lawsuit, the stepfather created more than 7,000 "fake explicit images of her using the AI chatbot Grok," including converting a photo taken of her when she was 11 into a sexually explicit image. Eventually, state and local law enforcement raided her stepfather's electronic devices for CSAM and two days after, he was found dead by suicide in his car, according to the report. Jane Doe 4 joins three other teenagers, who filed the original lawsuit that alleged that Grok was used to create sexually explicit deepfake images of them.

The number of unauthorised Gypsy and traveller sites is on the rise, with developments often carried out over Bank Holiday weekends. Since April, sites in Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and elsewhere have been transformed, prompting legal battles and local dismay. In January, the number of unauthorised traveller caravans - those without planning permission - across England stood at 4,950, a 73% increase on January 2020's figure of 2,860. The summer count also shows a rise, of 44% between July 2019 and July 2025, from 3,113 to 4,471. A senior councillor in one affected area warns there has been a loss of control of the planning system, while villagers living near one site likened its rapid construction to a military operation .

BBC seeks to subpoena Trump's family members in Panorama lawsuit The BBC has sought to subpoena members of Donald Trump's family for documents and testimony as it defends against the US president's $10bn (£7.4bn) defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. Court filings show that representatives for the BBC's legal team attempted in May to serve subpoenas to the president's son Donald Trump Jr., his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The president is suing the BBC over an episode of Panorama that edited together two different sections of a speech he gave before the 2021 Capitol riots. The BBC has previously apologised for the edit but denied it was grounds for defamation. Judge grants Trump's request to delay handing financial records to BBC In the latest filing, the BBC's lawyers argue Trump's family members have personal knowledge of his intentions in delivering the speech, making their testimony and documents relevant to the president's defamation claim.

The AI music generator Suno has announced that it will start watermarking songs created on its platform, amid a number of legal battles and increasing pressure from the music industry. Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said in a blog post that the platform's new "transparency tools" will include some kind of labelling system that shows people if a song has been generated on Suno when it appears on another platform. Details are vague, but Shulman said his company will adopt "new audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology" that helps it resist AI fraud more effectively. It sounds similar in principle to Google's SynthID, which allows AI-generated content to be traced back to its origin even after editing or compression has taken place, but it's not clear exactly how Suno's solution will work. Shulman did add that he and his company believe that it should ultimately be at the discretion of artists and platforms to decide whether they communicate when something was made with AI.

Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in California allege that the Department of Homeland Security revoked their Global Entry privileges in retaliation for exercising their constitutional rights.

A mid tech companies' ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual celebrity nudes, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, and millions of passwords acquired by hackers. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from "Celebgate," a 2014 hack that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others. Strike 3's file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking . Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.

An Ebike Company Was Sued Over Alleged Safety Misinformation. Several Chinese businesses associated with the ebike brand Aipas settled a lawsuit with Amazon and the safety certification company UL in July. Amazon and UL, a company that tests and certifies that products meet safety standards, settled a lawsuit in July with several Chinese companies that manufacture ebikes under the Aipas brand name. The US companies accused the Chinese firms in January of claiming in Amazon listings and on Aipas' website that the ebikes had been certified by UL, giving recognizable, brand-name assurance to online shoppers worried about risks like ebike lithium-ion battery fires . On July 15, a federal judge signed off on a permanent injunction in which the companies agreed that they would no longer use the UL mark.

Apple and Google ordered by San Francisco attorney to take action against'nudify' apps Apple and Google ordered by San Francisco attorney to take action against'nudify' apps Both companies were sent cease-and-desist letters regarding 13 apps on their respective stores. Apple and Google have been sent cease-and-desist letters that demand they remove AI-powered nudify apps from their respective app stores. As reported by Wired, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu ordered the two tech giants to take down a total of 13 apps that can be used to create AI-generated deepfake nude images. The letters appeal to Apple and Google to stop aiding and abetting the spread of nonconsensual intimate images, and ask them to stop working with the app developers in question. This isn't the first time Chiu has taken on deepfake platforms, having previously filed a lawsuit against 16 websites that allow users to turn images of real women and girls into pornography using AI.

The defendant used Grok to create sexualized images of adults and children, xAI says. SpaceXAI (as xAI) has filed a lawsuit against Terry Wayne Harwood, a 67-year-old man from South Carolina whom the company has accused of using Grok to generate sexual images of real people without their consent. In the complaint that xAI filed in Texas, it said that the defendant uploaded non-sexual images of numerous adults and minors to his two xAI accounts from December 8, 2025 until February 18, 2026. He then asked Grok to alter the photos or to create new images and videos depicting the adults and children in them in a pornographic manner or otherwise sexualizing them. The company said that Grok refused to follow his prompts on numerous occasions but that he repeatedly submitted edited prompts to circumvent the AI's safeguards. In one example mentioned in the filing, xAI said Harwood uploaded the photo of a fully dressed girl around 10 to 11 years old and then asked Grok to remove all of her clothing and make her do a Playboy model impression as she laid in bed.