Democratic US senators demand Apple, Google take X and Grok off app stores over sexual images

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three Democratic US senators are calling on Apple and Alphabet's Google to remove X and its built-in artificial intelligence chabot Grok from their app stores, citing the spread of nonconsensual sexual images of women and minors on the platform.

In a letter published Friday, senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, and Edward Markey of Massachusetts said Google and Apple "must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed."

X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has been under fire from officials around the world since last week, when Grok began flooding the site with AI-generated nonconsensual images of women and children wearing revealing bikinis, see-through underwear, or in degrading, violent, or sexualized poses.

The senators' letter, first reported by NBC News, noted that Google has terms of service that bar app makers from "creating, uploading, or distributing content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children," and that Apple has terms of service that bar "sexual or pornographic material." The senators noted that, in the past, both tech giants have moved swiftly to kick offending apps off their platforms.

"Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices," the letter said.

Google and Apple did not immediately return messages seeking comment. X referred Reuters to a January 2 post in which it said the site takes action "against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material."

X's parent company xAI did not answer specific questions about the letter or Grok's explicit output, sending only its generic response that cited unspecified "Legacy Media Lies."
Musk has responded with laugh-cry emojis to AI-altered photographs of prominent people in bikinis and posting several times a day about X's popularity. At one point, Musk blamed users for unlawful content generated by his chatbot, saying: "anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content."

With pressure mounting on Friday, Musk's xAI, which operates Grok and owns X, appeared to be imposing some restrictions on Grok's public image generation. Public requests from X users to digitally strip women down to bikinis were met with a message saying image editing functionality was "currently limited to paying subscribers." X users were still able to create sexualized images using the Grok tab and then post the images to X.

Reuters could not establish the extent to which the changes had curbed generation of nonconsensual imagery, if at all.

The standalone Grok app, which operates separately from X, was also still allowing users to generate images without a subscription.