Post Content
Elon Musk’s xAI nearly saw its Grok chatbot app removed from Apple’s App Store following the controversy that erupted over the surge of non-consensual, sexualised deepfakes generated using the AI tool earlier this year.
While Apple did not issue a public statement during the Grok ‘undressing’ controversy, the iPhone maker found that X and Grok had violated its App Store guidelines and threatened to take the Grok app down behind the scenes, according to a report by NBC News.
In January this year, both Google and Apple came under intense pressure from lawmakers to pull the Grok and X apps from their respective app stores in order to address the flood of sexualised deepfakes created by users who had discovered that the AI chatbot would readily comply with requests to undress people in photos, particularly women, including minors.
Apple reportedly “contacted the teams behind both X and Grok after it received complaints and saw news coverage of the scandal,” requiring “the app developers to create a plan to improve content moderation.” When X submitted an update of the Grok app for review by the App Store, the submission was rejected because the “changes didn’t go far enough.”
X once again submitted revised versions of the X and Grok apps but only one of them was accepted by the App Store. This is the first time details of Apple’s actions have been made public. It also underscores a growing rift between social media platforms and app stores. Previously, Musk has threatened to sue Apple for allegedly favouring rival OpenAI over Grok on its App Store.
Also Read | Leadership exits, Grok controversy: Why Elon Musk wants xAI to start over again
“Apple reviewed the next submissions made by the developers and determined that X had substantially resolved its violations, but the Grok app remained out of compliance. As a result, we rejected the Grok submission and notified the developer that additional changes to remedy the violation would be required, or the app could be removed from the App Store,” Apple was quoted as saying in a letter to US senators at the height of the backlash against Grok.
“Following further engagement and changes by the Grok developer, we determined that Grok had substantially improved and therefore approved its latest submission,” the letter read.
Story continues below this ad
xAI began this year with a surge of new users that were likely driven to the platform due to the company’s relatively lax approach to safeguarding Grok’s capabilities. The AI chatbot drew the ire of lawmakers and regulators around the world, including in India, after it was used to generate non-consensual sexual imagery of people, including minors in some cases.
In the aftermath of the Grok undressing controversy, three Democratic US senators – Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, and Edward Markey of Massachusetts – called on Apple and Google to remove X as well as the Grok app from their app stores.
The letter published in January 2026 noted that Apple’s App Store terms of service barred sexual or pornographic material while Google’s Play Store terms of service prohibited app developers from “creating, uploading, or distributing content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children.” “Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices,” the letter read.
Also Read | Grok controversy: Why Elon Musk’s X backed down, restricted AI tool from creating sexualised images
The Indian government responded to the controversy by issuing a stern notice, following which X removed 3,500 pieces of content and blocked 600 accounts while admitting its mistake. The government had expressed dissatisfaction over X’s response to its January 2 notice on its failure to observe due diligence obligations under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and associated rules.
Story continues below this ad
The platform faced a similar backlash in the UK, Malaysia and Indonesia. It quickly moved to limit Grok’s AI image generation capabilities only to paid users. “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk warned users on X.
Despite internal changes by xAI, the Grok issue does not appear to have been resolved. A separate report by NBC News found dozens of AI-generated sexualized images of real women posted to X over the past month.
“We strictly prohibit users from generating non-consensual explicit deepfakes and from using our tools to undress real people. xAI has extensive safeguards in place to prevent such misuse, such as continuous monitoring of public usage, analysis of evasion attempts in real time, frequent model updates, prompt filters, and additional safeguards,” the X Safety account posted in response to the NBC report.
A February report by Reuters had also found that while Grok’s public X account is no longer producing the same flood of sexualised imagery, the Grok chatbot app continues to do so when prompted, even after being warned that the subjects were vulnerable or would be humiliated by the pictures.
