Grok came under fire for generating sexually explicit deepfakes of women and minors early last month.
Britain's data regulator on Tuesday launched a probe into X and xAI to see whether Elon Musk's companies complied with personal data law when it came to AI chatbot Grok's generation of sexualised deepfakes.
It marks a wider UK probe over Grok, which is facing international backlash for allowing users to create and share sexualised pictures of women and children using simple text prompts.
“The reports about Grok raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used to generate intimate or sexualised images without their knowledge or consent, and whether the necessary safeguards were put in place to prevent this," William Malcolm, executive director, regulatory risk and innovation at the Information Commissioner’s Office, said in a statement.
"Losing control of personal data in this way can cause immediate and significant harm. This is particularly the case where children are involved".
Last month, the UK’s independent online safety watchdog, Ofcom, opened a formal investigation into X to determine whether it complied with its duties to protect people from content that is illegal.
The chatbot, which can be accessed through Musk's social media platform X, came under fire last month as it allowed users to generate sexualised deepfakes of mostly women and minors.
Governments around the world have condemned the platform and opened investigations into it.
Last week, the European Commission opened an investigation into the social media platform to look at whether or not the social media platform did enough to mitigate the risk of the images being created and disseminated.
