Three Tennessee teenagers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, alleging the company’s model powered an app used to create nonconsensual nude and sexually explicit images and videos of them when they were girls.
The complaint describes the victims’ images as disturbingly lifelike and says the AI-generated depictions were not labeled as synthetic. It quotes the complaint saying the AI-created child ‘can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful,’ and that the plaintiffs’ identifying features have been attached to videos that appear to show child sexual abuse.
According to the lawsuit, the person who produced the images did not use xAI’s Grok chatbot or Musk’s social platform X but relied on an unnamed app that used xAI’s algorithm, the plaintiffs say, citing law enforcement. The suit accuses xAI of licensing its technology to third-party app developers, often outside the United States, in a way that the plaintiffs say lets the company ‘outsource the liability’ for a dangerous tool.
This is the first known case in which underage people depicted in allegedly AI-generated child sexual abuse material have sued xAI. The company’s image-generation tools have been tied to millions of sexualized images over the past year, and earlier this year influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk, sued xAI over AI-produced images on X that allegedly depicted her nude as a teenager.
The complaint says one defendant used photos the plaintiff had sent privately, plus images from a yearbook and social media, to generate sexualized pictures and a video that showed a plaintiff removing clothing until she was nude. Prosecutors say the same person created sexually explicit material of 18 other people and traded those images online; he was arrested, the suit notes.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Vanessa Baehr-Jones said the teenagers, named as Jane Does 1, 2 and 3, want to change how AI companies weigh business choices around sexually explicit content: ‘We want to make it one [a business decision] that does not make any business sense anymore,’ she said. The plaintiffs are seeking damages for emotional distress and other harms caused by the images.
Apps that ‘nudify’ photos have existed for years, but last year major AI firms including Google, OpenAI and xAI updated image-generation tools that can strip clothing down to bikinis. Google and OpenAI have adopted digital watermarks to disclose AI origin; xAI has not. xAI did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.