Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, filed a lawsuit at the High Court on June 3 alleging that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI designed its Grok chatbot without safeguards that allowed users to create fake sexualised images of her. The claim, brought under the Data Protection Act and for tortious misuse of private information, seeks damages and aims to establish a legal precedent that AI companies are liable for the design of their systems — even after those systems are modified to block the harmful behaviour.
Asato was targeted in January after she spoke out about deepfake imagery, she said, and spoke in the House of Commons at the time about how Grok had been used to create the fake bikini images of her. xAI later said users would no longer be able to use the tool to generate sexualised images of real people, and it has since become illegal in the UK to create or request a non-consensual deepfake image of an adult. Asato argued that the company’s subsequent changes do not erase the initial harm.
“If you think about any other products, like a car, for example, that might have been manufactured with a fault, it doesn’t matter if, you know, the cars get recalled and the faults are fixed and no more harm is done,” Asato said. “It matters that the car was produced with the fault in the first place, and that’s the problem with Grok, is that it was created without the safeguards and without the guardrails to prevent this from happening in the first place. I guess that’s the centre of my case, is to say that it doesn’t matter how quickly things were then repaired. Once the damage is done, the damage is done.”
Ravi Naik of law firm AWO, which is representing Asato, said: “Where there is a wrong, the law must provide a remedy, and that is as true of artificial intelligence as of anything else. No-one should be subjected to abuse like this, and no-one should have to instruct a lawyer to get images like these taken down. This content existed because of design choices made by engineers at xAI. This is one of the first claims to test liability for the design of an AI system, and we aim to make it clear that safety cannot be an afterthought.”
xAI has been contacted for comment. Separately, social media site X, also owned by Musk, has previously said it would take action against illegal content on its platform. Musk said in January: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
The lawsuit is part of a wave of global legal and regulatory action against xAI and X over deepfake content. MSI previously reported that Tennessee teens sued xAI over deepfake sexual images in March, and that Ashley St. Clair filed a similar lawsuit in January.