Elon Musk’s xAI has filed a federal lawsuit against a South Carolina man, Terry Wayne Harwood, accusing him of using its Grok chatbot to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in violation of the company’s terms of service.
The lawsuit, filed in a US district court, seeks unspecified damages and a permanent ban preventing Harwood from accessing Grok. It is one of the first cases brought by an AI company against a user for generating explicit AI content, marking a shift in how platform operators address misuse of generative models.
xAI’s legal strategy rests on the argument that AI-generated outputs are user content, and that users who bypass safety safeguards to create illegal material are solely responsible for their actions. The company has previously faced sustained criticism over its moderation approach, Grok’s built-in “Spicy Mode” and a December 2025 post from Musk that amplified the image-generation feature on X were cited by critics as contributing to a surge in non-consensual sexualized imagery.
Watchdog groups estimate that Grok generated between 1.8 million and 3 million sexualized images in a ten-day window spanning late December 2025 and early January 2026, including approximately 23,000 depicting children, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate and a New York Times analysis. The surge followed Musk responding “Perfect” to a bikini image of himself generated by the tool, with output rising from roughly 300,000 images in the nine days before the post to nearly 600,000 per day afterward.
xAI faces multiple class-action lawsuits from victims, including three teenage girls who filed a case in March alleging that Grok was used to create sexually explicit images of them when they were minors. That lawsuit was later expanded to include two additional plaintiffs after a minor’s stepfather allegedly used Grok to generate more than 7,000 CSAM images from a single photo of her at age 11. The city of Baltimore has also sued xAI, X Corp, and SpaceX under local consumer protection laws, alleging the companies “designed, marketed, and deployed” Grok knowing it could generate CSAM while publicly claiming such content was prohibited.
xAI’s lawsuit against Harwood represents an attempt to position the company as actively policing its platform, even as it faces mounting regulatory scrutiny. Canada’s privacy watchdog has launched an investigation into xAI over Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfakes, and the company continues to face pressure from EU regulators under the Digital Services Act.
A press office for xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Sources: Ars Technica; Quartz; CyberScoop via AI Europe; Decrypt