French prosecutors suspect Musk encouraged deepfakes row to inflate X value

PARIS – French prosecutors said on March 21 they had alerted the US authorities to a suspicion that tech tycoon Elon Musk had encouraged sexualised deepfakes on X to “artificially” increase the value of his company.

The social media network’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok stirred outrage earlier in 2026 over it generating images of women and girls in minimal attire without their consent.

“The controversy sparked by sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok (X’s AI) may have been deliberately generated in order to artificially boost the value of companies X and X AI,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said, confirming a report in Le Monde newspaper on March 20.

This could have been done towards “the planned June 2026 stock market listing of the new entity created by the merger” between Space X and X AI, it added.

The prosecutor’s office said it had reached out on March 17 to the US Department of Justice, as well as French lawyers at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a financial market regulation body, to share its concerns.

X’s lawyer in France was not immediately available for comment.

The French authorities are investigating X over allegations that its algorithm was used to interfere in French politics, as well as Grok’s dissemination of Holocaust denials and the sexualised deepfakes.

AI chatbot Grok has its own account on the X social network that allows users to interact with it.

For a period, users could tag the bot in posts to request image generation and editing, receiving the image in a reply from Grok. Many sent Grok photos of women or tagged the bot in replies to women’s photo posts, giving it prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.

‘Incitements’

It generated an estimated three million sexualised images – mostly of women, though also 23,000 that appeared to depict children – in 11 days, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit watchdog, said in late January.

Le Monde pointed to “several posts by Musk, published at the height of the controversy, which prosecutors interpret as incitements to generate non-consensual images”.

“The billionaire posted several messages in which he expressed delight, using numerous emojis, about his AI engine’s ‘undressing’ capabilities, even sharing an image of himself in which his chatbot depicted him wearing a bikini,” Le Monde reported.

Daily average app downloads for Grok worldwide soared by 72 per cent from Jan 1 to 19 compared with the same period in December, the Washington Post has cited market intelligence firm Sensor Tower as saying.

The French authorities in February summoned Mr Musk to a “voluntary interview” and searched the local offices of his social media network, in what Mr Musk called a “political attack”.

Britain and the European Union have also opened investigations into the creation of sexualised deepfakes of women and children by Mr Musk’s AI chatbot Grok. AFP