The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said it has identified the misuse of Grok to generate and disseminate harmful content.
Malaysia’s communications regulator said on Tuesday (Jan 13) that it will take legal action against social media platform X due to concerns over user safety in relation to artificial intelligence feature Grok.
The generative AI chatbot Grok has sparked a global backlash by allowing users to create and publish sexualised images, prompting authorities around the world to take action against xAI, the Elon Musk-led firm behind the chatbot.
Malaysia and Indonesia temporarily blocked Grok over the weekend, while Britain’s media regulator on Monday launched an investigation into Musk’s X.
Ofcom is probing X to determine whether sexually intimate deepfakes produced by Grok violated its duty to protect people in the UK from content that could be illegal, under the country’s Online Safety Act framework.
In France, government ministers said they had referred sexually explicit Grok-generated content circulating on X to prosecutors and also alerted French media regulator Arcom to check the platform’s compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said it has identified the misuse of Grok to generate and disseminate harmful content, including obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive and non-consensual manipulated images.
“Content allegedly involving women and minors is of serious concern. Such conduct contravenes Malaysian law and undermines the entities’ stated safety commitments,” the commission said in a statement.
xAI replied to a Reuters email seeking comment with what seemed to be an automated response: “Legacy Media Lies.”
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Malaysia’s communications regulator said it served notices to X and xAI this month to remove the harmful content but said no action has been taken by the firms.
Muslim-majority Malaysia has strict laws governing online content, including a ban on obscene and pornographic materials.
Malaysian authorities consider online gambling, scams, child pornography and grooming, cyberbullying and content related to race, religion and royalty as harmful.
GLOBAL REACTION
Elsewhere, Germany’s media minister Wolfram Weimer called on the European Commission to take legal steps, saying EU rules provided tools to tackle illegal content and alleging the problem risked turning into the “industrialisation of sexual harassment”.
Italy’s data protection authority warned that using AI tools to create “undressed” deepfake imagery of real people without consent could amount to serious privacy violations and, in some cases, criminal offences.
Swedish political leaders have also condemned Grok-generated sexualised “undressing” content after reporting that imagery involving Sweden’s deputy prime minister was produced from a user prompt.
The European Commission has extended a retention order sent to X last year to retain and preserve all internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026, amid concern over Grok-generated sexualised “undressed” images.
