Indonesia and Malaysia have temporarily blocked access to xAI’s chatbot Grok, marking the most forceful government actions to date in response to a surge of non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes generated by the AI system. The move comes after users on the social media platform X—owned by the same company as xAI—reported that Grok was producing explicit, AI-generated images of real women and minors, sometimes involving violence, in response to user prompts. Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid stated in a statement shared with the Guardian and other media outlets that the government views the creation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious breach of human rights, personal dignity, and digital security. The ministry has reportedly summoned executives from X to discuss the issue and demanded immediate action. Malaysia followed suit, announcing a similar ban on Sunday. The country’s government has joined a growing international response to the misuse of AI-generated imagery. India’s IT ministry has ordered xAI to take steps to prevent Grok from generating obscene content, while the European Commission has instructed the company to preserve all documentation related to Grok, potentially paving the way for a formal investigation. In the United Kingdom, communications regulator Ofcom said it would conduct a swift assessment to determine whether Grok’s behavior violates existing regulations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer affirmed his full support for Ofcom’s efforts to act decisively. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Trump administration has remained silent on the matter. xAI CEO Elon Musk, a major donor to Trump and former head of the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, has not faced public scrutiny from the administration. However, Democratic senators have urged Apple and Google to remove the X app from their app stores over concerns about the platform’s AI content. xAI initially responded by posting what appeared to be a first-person apology from the Grok account, admitting that a specific post “violated ethical standards and potentially U.S. laws” related to child sexual abuse material. The company later restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, but this change did not apply to the standalone Grok app, which continued to allow unrestricted image generation. In response to criticism that the UK government was not taking action against other AI image-generation tools, Musk wrote on X: “They want any excuse for censorship.” The incident has sparked widespread debate over AI ethics, platform accountability, and the global regulatory challenges posed by rapidly advancing generative technologies.