Lawsuits and Investigations Expose Lack of Transparency in AI Safety

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In the span of just 11 days, the AI image generator Grok, built by Elon Musk's xAI and embedded in the social media platform X, is alleged to have produced around 3 million sexually explicit images, with an estimated 23,000 depicting minors. This has sparked a wave of regulatory investigations, legislative responses, and now lawsuits from the city of Baltimore and a class action of three teenage girls. However, the key issue is that no one can independently verify what Grok's safety systems did or did not do during this period, as the necessary evidence infrastructure does not yet exist at scale.

Why it matters

This case highlights the urgent need for independently verifiable audit trails for AI safety decisions. Without the ability to transparently review and validate the performance of AI systems, especially in high-stakes domains like content moderation, the public and authorities are left with unverifiable claims from tech companies. This undermines trust and accountability around the deployment of powerful AI technologies.

The details

The lawsuits allege that xAI marketed Grok as a safe, general-purpose AI assistant while failing to implement basic safeguards against generating child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate imagery. Both the Baltimore lawsuit and the class action lawsuit seek damages, but face the same evidentiary problem - the lack of independently verifiable evidence about what Grok's safety systems actually did or did not do during the 11-day period in question. xAI claims it implemented content moderation, but when regulators like the European Commission tried to investigate and demand preservation of documents, the necessary evidence infrastructure was not there.

• Between December 29, 2025 and January 8, 2026, Grok is alleged to have produced around 3 million sexually explicit images, with an estimated 23,000 depicting minors.
• On March 16, 2026, three teenage girls from Tennessee filed a class action lawsuit against xAI, X Corp., and SpaceX in the Northern District of California.
• On March 24, 2026, the city of Baltimore filed a lawsuit against xAI, X Corp., and SpaceX in Baltimore City Circuit Court.
• In March 2026, the European Commission opened a formal Digital Services Act investigation and ordered xAI to preserve all Grok-related documents through 2026.

What’s next

The judge in the Baltimore lawsuit will determine whether to allow the case to proceed, while the class action lawsuit in California will continue to work its way through the legal system. The European Commission's Digital Services Act investigation into xAI's practices is also ongoing.