French cybercrime investigators raided X's Paris headquarters on Tuesday, summoning Elon Musk to appear for questioning on April 20. The criminal probe targets Grok, Musk's AI chatbot, for generating deepfake nude images including those depicting children, antisemitic content, and child pornography. Former X CEO Linda Yaccarino was also called for a "voluntary interview." Skip the summons, and French media says arrest warrants could follow.
The Paris raid triggered a pile-on. Britain's data regulator opened its own Grok probe the same day. Ofcom had already launched a separate investigation on January 12. The European Union added a Grok inquiry to its existing case against X in late January. In the US, multiple state attorneys general are demanding changes to stop nonconsensual sexualized images. X claimed it restricted Grok's ability to generate sexualized content in Britain. But the Guardian reported in January that such images were still accessible.
Here's the charge that matters most for anyone building AI agents: "fraudulent data extraction." French investigators are scrutinizing whether xAI bypassed technical access barriers like robots.txt files and authentication walls. Or broke API rate limits to harvest training data for Grok. The "fraudulent" label suggests the data collection involved misrepresenting user agents or scraping personal data without the consent GDPR requires. Investigators believe Grok's training pipeline retained data users had deleted or restricted. Raw social media posts got converted into model weights with no regard for privacy settings. xAI prioritized data volume over hygiene. They didn't scrub personally identifiable information or data tied to minors. That's what pushed this from a civil privacy issue to criminal charges.
X called the raid "staged" and part of a "politicized criminal investigation" designed to pressure senior management in the US. Musk previously labeled the French probe "politically motivated." The case echoes France's ongoing criminal prosecution of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, detained in Paris in 2024 over illegal content on his messaging app. "France is the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom," Durov wrote on X after the raid.