A growing number of individuals are taking legal action against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI after the Labour MP Jess Asato launched a test case over non-consensual sexualised images created by its Grok chatbot. Ravi Naik, legal director of the law firm AWO, confirmed he is now acting for “multiple individuals” who have come forward following coverage of Asato’s decision to sue xAI for damages. Many of the new claimants had previously struggled to persuade X, Musk’s social media platform, to remove degrading, AI-generated content until they obtained legal support, Naik said.
New Claimants Emerge
The handful of complainants contacted Naik on Thursday, the same day Asato announced her High Court claim against xAI. The original lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, concerns fake images of the MP in a bikini and an AI-created video she said showed her “being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault”. Naik said the new cases involve similar degrading, non-consensual content produced by Grok, which is integrated into X and allows users to alter online images of real people with prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.
Asato described the experience as “psychologically distressing” and said it went “to the core of understanding what it means not to consent to something which literally strips your clothes off and makes you vulnerable”. She stated that Grok had created “deepfake pornography and sexualised content which harmed thousands of women and children”. The MP first complained about the trend in January but received a stream of abusive responses on X, one of which was shared by Musk. In response to his retweet, a user posted the chloroform video. On Thursday, as she announced the legal proceedings, Asato received further verbal abuse on the platform, including a new AI-generated image of her stripped to a bikini created using a different tool.
The Legal Case Against AI Developers
Asato’s claim, lodged at the High Court in London, argues that xAI violated data protection law and breached her private information when it allowed the images to be generated. The MP is seeking financial damages, a judicial finding that xAI’s conduct was unlawful, and an injunction to compel the company to cease ongoing violations and implement safeguards against future abuse. Her legal team frames the case as a test for AI developer liability, with Naik arguing that “just as if you’re an architect and build a building, you have liability for that architecture”.
“Those that build and deploy AI models make design choices about how these models operate,” Naik said. “This will be the case that looks at liability for decisions in those design choices.” Asato echoed that view, saying she wanted to demonstrate that “AI companies are responsible for the design choices that they make when they launch their products”. She noted that “there were guardrails that the engineers and Elon Musk could have put in place to stop Grok from being able to create sexualised images but they decided not to put those guardrails in place”.
The legal argument rests on the premise that xAI cannot claim immunity simply because users, rather than the company, typed the prompts. Instead, Asato’s team contend that the architecture of Grok — which was designed to permit the manipulation of real people’s images into sexualised forms without meaningful checks — makes the developer directly liable. Safety, Naik said, “should not be an afterthought”. The claim is considered one of the first in the UK to test this precise question of design accountability.
The lawsuit is part of a broader wave of legal challenges xAI faces globally. In the United States, the City of Baltimore filed a lawsuit in March alleging that Grok’s ability to generate fabricated sexualised imagery violated its consumer protection statute. A class-action lawsuit by three teenagers in Tennessee also targets the company over non-consensual deepfake pornography. In that case, xAI is seeking to unmask four anonymous plaintiffs, who argue that public identification would increase their risk of harassment.
The “Bikinification” Trend and xAI’s Response
The “bikinification” trend went viral on Musk’s platform in January 2026, when Grok generated approximately three million sexualised images in less than two weeks. Researchers described it as “an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”. In mid-January, xAI announced it had restricted Grok’s image-editing features and placed the technology behind a paywall, stating it would block users from generating images of people in revealing clothing in “jurisdictions where it’s illegal”. Despite these changes, reports from early February indicated that Grok continued to generate sexualised images even when users explicitly warned that the subjects did not consent. Testing by NBC News in early June also showed the tool was still capable of producing sexual deepfakes.
The UK government has moved to strengthen the legal framework around such content. Provisions of the Data (Use and Access) Act now make it a criminal offence to create or request AI-generated intimate images without consent, closing a previous loophole where such images could exist in a legal grey area if not shared. The Crime and Policing Bill is also set to criminalise the supply of tools designed to generate non-consensual intimate images. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, has launched a formal investigation into X’s compliance with the Online Safety Act concerning Grok’s capabilities.
Political Fallout and Wider Context
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has publicly backed Asato’s legal action, calling the images “disgusting” and saying he is “100% behind the action that she has taken”. Business Secretary Peter Kyle, who formerly served as technology secretary, said it was important that UK politicians were “assertive” in holding Musk to account. “Musk is a complex and extreme person,” Kyle said. “He’s an extremely successful innovator and commercialiser of innovation, but he also has extreme personal views.” Kyle added that Musk was “taking a much more active and extreme role in British politics”.
The lawsuit comes amid heightened sensitivity to Musk’s involvement in UK domestic affairs, following a flurry of posts from the billionaire commenting on the police response to the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in December 2025. Nowak died from stab wounds; his killer, Vickrum Digwa, claimed self-defence and alleged racial abuse. Police handcuffed Nowak as he lay dying, and Musk criticised the officers, offering to fund a wrongful death lawsuit against them. Starmer accused Musk of trying to “whip up division” in the UK, stating that Britain is a nation of “reasonable, tolerant people”.
xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Asato also noted that Musk could have made different choices after she complained in January. “He could have made different choices about the way he and his company approached the fact that I, as an elected politician in the UK, was saying that I felt humiliated and distressed by what his product was doing,” she said. Despite the restrictions introduced by xAI, reports indicate that Grok’s safeguards remain porous, with the tool still able to generate non-consensual sexual deepfakes months after the initial outcry.
