• 2 min read
xAI sues Grok user over sexualized deepfakes
xAI sued a South Carolina man it says used Grok to make nonconsensual sexualized images of adults and children.
Image: Engadget
xAI has sued Terry Wayne Harwood, a 67-year-old man from South Carolina, accusing him of using Grok to generate sexualized images of real adults and children without their consent.
In a complaint filed in Texas, xAI said Harwood uploaded non-sexual images of numerous adults and minors to two xAI accounts between December 8, 2025 and February 18, 2026. According to the filing, he then asked Grok to alter the photos or create new images and videos depicting those people “in a pornographic manner or otherwise sexualizing them.”
xAI said Grok rejected those prompts on numerous occasions, but Harwood allegedly kept editing and resubmitting requests to get around the system’s safeguards. In one example cited in the lawsuit, the company said he uploaded a photo of a fully dressed girl believed to be around 10 to 11 years old and asked Grok to remove her clothing and make her do a “Playboy model impression” while lying in bed. The lawsuit says Grok refused, but Harwood continued submitting modified prompts.
According to Reuters, the case is one of the first lawsuits by an AI company against one of its own users, signaling that xAI is willing to take legal action over misuse of Grok.
Reports began surfacing in early January that Grok could turn photos of real women and children into sexualized images. Regulators moved quickly: California opened an inquiry in mid-January, while Ofcom in the UK, the European Commission, and Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also launched investigations. xAI introduced new measures after those probes began, but the source says users could still use Grok to undress men, and Harwood allegedly continued uploading images and generating sexualized edits.
Recommended reading
Yandex certifies all Alice AI models to ISO/IEC 42001
The South Carolina Attorney General’s office announced Harwood’s arrest on March 9 through the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. He was charged with:
- three counts of second degree sexual exploitation of a minor
- five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in the third degree
The source says Harwood was accused not only of possessing child sexual abuse material, but also of distributing it. xAI is seeking an unspecified amount in damages and wants the court to make Harwood cover the company’s costs in defending itself against any legal action brought by his alleged victims.
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via Engadget
