Senators urged Apple and Google to remove Musk's X and Grok from app stores over sexual deepfakes

Source: NBC News

Jan. 9, 2026, 11:00 AM EST


Three Democratic senators urged Apple and Google to remove Elon Musk’s apps X and Grok from their app stores Thursday evening after xAI’s Grok artificial intelligence tool had been used to flood X with sexualized nonconsensual images of real people. Hours later, X adjusted how the Grok reply bot operated on the social media site, restricting its image generation to paying premium subscribers, and seemingly restricting what types of images the Grok reply bot can create on X.

The Grok reply bot on X has churned out thousands of sexualized images an hour this week, mostly of women but at times of children. Early Friday, it appears to have pivoted to limiting that feature on the social media app. But in the Grok tab on X and on the stand-alone Grok app and website, Grok will still create sexualized deepfakes.

In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico asked the companies to “enforce” terms of service that appear to ban the activity that was surging on X and is still possible on Grok.

In a statement Friday, Wyden emphasized that the changes on X do not address concerns that Grok is still flooding social media feeds with the nonconsensual sexual imagery. “All X’s changes do is make some of its users pay for the privilege of producing horrific images on the X app, while Musk profits from the abuse of children,” he said in a statement to NBC News.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/senators-urged-apple-google-remove-x-grok-app-stores-rcna253048