Elon Musk calls UK ‘fascist’ as row over X’s Grok AI images escalates

Elon Musk

Elon Musk accused the UK government of being “fascist” after it stepped up threats to block X over sexualized images of women and children produced by his artificial intelligence tool Grok.

Responding to a chart claiming to show the UK had the highest arrests for social media comments in the world, Musk posted: “Why is the UK government so fascist?” In separate posts hours earlier, Musk said the UK wanted to “suppress free speech” and referred to the country as a “prison island.”

X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a top site for images of people who have been non-consensually undressed by AI, according to third-party analysis, with thousands of instances each hour over a day earlier this week.

The UK watchdog responsible for flagging online child sexual-abuse material to law enforcement agencies said it had found “criminal” images on the dark web allegedly generated by Grok.

The dark web images depict “sexualized and topless” images of girls between the ages of 11 and 13 and meet the bar for action by law enforcement, the Internet Watch Foundation said. xAI operates Grok and the social media platform X.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed action earlier this week, demanding Musk’s X urgently “get their act together” over the sexualized images. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in a statement Friday that media regulator Ofcom should use its “full legal powers” and warned the govenrment could “block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law.”