A deluge of sexual images created by Musk's Grok AI tool has prompted a public and political outcry. A deluge of sexual images created by Musk's Grok AI tool has prompted a public and political outcry. Mon 12 Jan 2026 07.23 ESTFirst published on Mon 12 Jan 2026 06.02 EST The UK media watchdog has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk's X over the use of the Grok AI tool to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes. Ofcom has acted following a public and political outcry over a deluge of sexual images appearing on the platform, created by Musk's Grok, which is integrated with X. The regulator is investigating X under the Online Safety Act (OSA), which carries a range of possible punishments for breaches, including a UK ban of apps and websites for the most serious abuses.

The UK government says it will ban so-called nudification apps as part of efforts to tackle misogyny online. New laws - announced on Thursday as part of a wider strategy to halve violence against women and girls - will make it illegal to create and supply AI tools letting users edit images to seemingly remove someone's clothing. The new offences would build on existing rules around sexually explicit deepfakes and intimate image abuse, the government said. Women and girls deserve to be safe online as well as offline, said Technology Secretary Liz Kendall. We will not stand by while technology is weaponised to abuse, humiliate and exploit them through the creation of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes.

The politics of AI regulation became a little clearer this weekend, after an influential Labour thinktank laid out its framework for how the party should approach the topic in its manifesto. The policy paper, produced by the centre-left Labour Together thinktank, proposes a legal ban on dedicated nudification tools that allow users to generate explicit content by uploading images of real people. It would also create an obligation for developers of general-purpose AI tools and web hosting companies to take reasonable steps to ensure they are not involved in the production of such images, or other harmful deepfakes. Labour Together's suggestions aren't party policy yet, but they point at the sort of issues Westminster wonks think a campaign can be built on. For the last few decades, technology has been a curiously apolitical realm in the UK, with all parties agreeing on the vague idea that it's important to support British technology as a driver of growth and soft power, and little active campaigning beyond that.