The Indian government has issued a stern directive to Elon Musk’s social media company X, demanding urgent fixes to its AI chatbot Grok after the tool was widely misused to generate and circulate obscene, sexually explicit and otherwise unlawful content targeting women and children.
In a formal notice dated January 2, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told X to submit a detailed Action Taken Report within 72 hours outlining what technical, procedural and governance‑level measures it has implemented to prevent Grok from producing harmful content. Government officials also directed the platform to immediately remove or disable all existing objectionable material.
The ministry’s letter, addressed to X’s chief compliance officer for India operations, flagged serious failures in the platform’s due‑diligence and content moderation systems. It noted that users had been exploiting Grok’s AI capabilities to manipulate images often uploaded by women, into sexualised, indecent outputs through prompts and image editing, and then sharing the results. The notice described the situation as a “gross misuse of artificial intelligence technologies” and a violation of Indian law, including provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
MeitY warned that failure to comply with its directives could jeopardise X’s legal protections under Section 79 of the IT Act, which shields intermediaries from liability for user‑generated content, protections that are conditional on strict compliance with content moderation and takedown obligations. The notice stressed that non‑compliance could result in legal action not just against the platform, but also against responsible officers and offending users.
The move follows a surge in complaints, including from lawmakers such as Rajya Sabha member Priyanka Chaturvedi, who said fake accounts and AI prompts were being used to minimise clothing and sexualise women’s photos. It also comes amid a broader global backlash against Grok after reports that the AI had generated sexualised images of minors and other objectionable outputs.
India’s action is one of the strictest regulatory responses yet to the growing challenges of AI‑generated content moderation, highlighting the legal and ethical issues platforms face when advanced generative tools are deployed without effective safeguards. MeitY has demanded not only content removal but also a comprehensive review of Grok’s design to ensure it no longer facilitates nudity, sexualisation or other unlawful material.
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