French prosecutors have raided X’s offices in Paris on Tuesday as part of a criminal investigation into the platform’s Grok AI tool, widely used to generate sexually explicit images.
The investigation was opened in January 2025 and expanded after complaints about Grok generating illegal content and X being used to share sexual deepfakes and Holocaust-denial content.
The search was conducted by officers of the National Gendarmerie’s cybercrime unit, with assistance from Europol officials.
The Paris prosecutor’s office also announced today that it summoned Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews on April 20 in connection with the probe, with additional X employees to be questioned as witnesses between April 20 and April 24.
“The voluntary interviews with the executives should allow them to present their position on the facts and, where applicable, the compliance measures envisaged,” said Laure Beccuau, the public prosecutor of Paris. “At this stage, the investigation is being conducted in a constructive manner, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that platform X complies with French law, insofar as it operates on national territory.”
The cybercrime division is investigating seven criminal offenses, including complicity in possessing and distributing child pornography, violations related to sexual deepfakes, Holocaust denial, fraudulent data extraction, system tampering, and operating an illegal online platform as part of an organized criminal enterprise.
X’s Global Government Affairs account previously described the French authorities’ probe over alleged algorithm manipulation and alleged “fraudulent data extraction” (also part of the current investigation) as “a politically-motivated criminal investigation.”
The European Commission launched its own probe in January 2026 to find whether X properly assessed risks under the Digital Services Act before deploying the Grok artificial intelligence tool after it was used to generate sexually explicit images.
X is also being investigated by Ofcom (the UK’s independent online safety watchdog), and the Office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta over nonconsensual sexually explicit material generated using Grok, while the Information Commissioner’s Office reached out to both AI and X for more details on the measures they took to comply with European data protection law.
The European Commission fined X €120 million ($140 million) in December for violations of transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
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