Three Tennessee teenagers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, alleging that a large language model the company developed powered an app used to create nonconsensual nude and sexually explicit images and videos of them when they were girls.
The complaint describes the AI-generated depictions as horrifyingly realistic, saying, “Like a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts, this [AI-generated] child can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful. To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real. For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse.”
The lawsuit does not accuse xAI’s chatbot Grok or the social media platform X of being used directly by the perpetrator. Instead, plaintiffs say law enforcement informed them the defendant relied on an unnamed app that used xAI’s algorithm. The complaint contends xAI intentionally licensed its technology to app makers, often outside the U.S., allowing the company to “outsource the liability of their incredibly dangerous tool.”
This is the first lawsuit brought by underage people who say xAI’s model generated child sexual abuse material depicting them. Over the past year, xAI’s image-generation tools have been linked to millions of sexualized images of people. Earlier this year influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk, sued xAI over AI-produced images on X showing her nude as a teenager.
According to the complaint, the person who produced the sexualized material had a “close and friendly relationship” with one plaintiff and used photos she sent him plus images gathered from a yearbook and social media to create the images and videos. One alleged video shows a plaintiff “undressing until she was entirely nude,” and the plaintiffs said the content was disturbingly lifelike and not labeled as AI-generated.
The complaint says the perpetrator also created sexually explicit material of 18 other people and exchanged the images online; he was arrested, the filing alleges. The plaintiffs, identified as Jane Does 1, 2 and 3, are seeking damages for emotional distress and other harms.
Their attorney, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, said the teenagers aim to change how AI companies treat sexually explicit content, arguing it should not be a profitable business choice. She said they want companies to make business decisions that remove incentives to enable such content.
Apps that can “nudify” people have existed in the internet’s shadows for years. Last year, major AI companies including Google, OpenAI and xAI altered image-generation tools in ways that made it easier to produce images stripping people down to bikinis. Google and OpenAI implemented digital watermarks to disclose AI origins; xAI has not adopted that standard. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
