InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.

A Memphis data center run by SpaceXAI is apparently the source of the issue that took out Grok for more than three hours Thursday. The company issued a brief apology to Grok users, as well as to unnamed "compute partners" who were also apparently affected by the issues. "We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning," the company wrote. "We'd also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners." We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.

Many of the lawsuits xAI is facing'stem from a period at the start of this year when loose safeguards on Grok allowed users to direct it to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images'. Many of the lawsuits xAI is facing'stem from a period at the start of this year when loose safeguards on Grok allowed users to direct it to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images'. Child sexual abuse survivor alleges Elon Musk's AI chatbot used photos of her to generate new illegal images Musk denied he was aware Grok ever produced'any naked underage images' A survivor of child sexual abuse has sued Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, alleging that its chatbot used pictures of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic images that depict her. "Using real images of Plaintiff and class members, Grok generated child pornography depicting Plaintiff and class members," states the complaint, which was filed last week in a US district court in California. Attorneys for the plaintiff, who is listed as Jane Doe in the case to protect her identity, accuse xAI of both generating CSAM of their client and of ingesting child sexual abuse images depicting her into the company's datasets after new images were publicly posted.

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 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.

Elon Musk's xAI has filed a lawsuit against a South Carolina man who was arrested earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging that he misused the company's AI tool to create sexually explicit content involving a child. The lawsuit, filed in a Texas federal court on Tuesday, alleges that Terry Harwood knowingly violated the company's terms of service to create the material. Despite expressly agreeing to abide by the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, Defendant designed misleading prompts to circumvent Grok's built-in safeguards and then abused the tool to convert non-sexual photographs into sexually explicit images without the photograph subjects' knowledge or consent," the 12-page complaint said. The suit alleges that Harwood uploaded images of both adults and minors that were not sexual in nature and then tried to create so-called "deepfakes" that sexualised them. "A review of Defendant's xAI accounts further shows that on numerous occasions during the Relevant Period, Defendant submitted prompts to Grok to alter such images to sexualize the subjects of the images, which Grok responded to by refusing to follow the prompts on the basis that such material violated Grok's content moderation guardrails," the complaint added. "In response, Defendant repeatedly submitted further prompts, with alterations, in an effort to circumvent Grok's moderation efforts." The suit is the first brought by an AI company against one of its users and comes amid intense scrutiny of xAI around the world for allowing users to create this kind of content on the platform in the first place. Grok has been under the spotlight in Washington, been in the crosshairs of European regulators, and faced bans in both Malaysia and Indonesia regarding sexually explicit content that can be created on the platform. Earlier this year, Musk pushed back on allegations that Grok produced AI-generated sexualised images of children, especially nude images. "I [am] not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.

NSFW uses account for well over half of traffic, a new report says. We've seen that play out in some disastrous ways over the last year, but we're now gaining some insight into why the company has leaned so hard into that strategy despite some veritable PR disasters. It turns out that NSFW activities account for well over half of Grok's traffic, according to a new report in that cites two former employees of the SpaceX-owned company. That includes using Grok to generate actual porn, as well as adult role-play chats and huge volumes of requests for erotica. Grok's users have even apparently discovered that it's cheaper to channel such requests through the company's models intended for writing code because those are cheaper to use.

Activists raised a 40-foot-tall inflatable Elon Musk in Manhattan to draw attention to the risk he allegedly poses to investors. It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging "Grok makes AI child porn" and "SpaceX owns Grok," referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image-generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out flyers with additional information, but they would not speak with the media. The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as "a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens," ahead of SpaceX's initial public offering on Friday. The location was strategically chosen--right in front of the Nasdaq and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO .

A WIRED investigation found dozens of "nudified" deepfake images and videos on Grok's website, including nonconsensual depictions of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician. Elon Musk's Grok chatbot is apparently still being used to produce and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women, months after Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI said it would introduce restrictions to stop the creation of potentially harmful sexualized deepfakes. The revelations come as SpaceX, xAI's parent company, prepares to go public on Friday in one of the largest IPOs of all time. The Grok Imagine generative AI system has been used to create and host images and videos depicting celebrities and at least one politician being held against their will by a giant man, portraying women performing sex acts, and allowing full nudity, a WIRED analysis of public creations found. While some of the images and videos are fully AI-generated or in animated styles, others are photorealistic and show plausible real-world scenarios.