Grok Deepfake Probe Just Got More Serious in Paris

French officials are taking a much closer look at X.com. The Paris prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that its cybercrime unit, with assistance from Europol, has raided the offices of Elon Musk's social media platform there as part of a probe launched in January, per CNN. Prosecutors have requested Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino testify at hearings scheduled for April. X employees will be heard as witnesses, according to the statement.

Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the probe, which Politico notes initially centered on suspected misuse of algorithms, has widened to cover what she called "Grok's sexualized deepfakes," per CNN. Grok is X's artificial intelligence chatbot, which drew heavy criticism after it was shown to generate sexually explicit images, including digitally altered pictures that appeared to undress women and minors at users' request.

The AP notes that, after making the announcement about the investigation on X itself, Paris prosecutors said they were leaving the platform and encouraged others to do the same. Per Reuters, they say they'll be using Instagram and LinkedIn to communicate with the public going forward. The French investigation follows a separate inquiry opened last week by the European Commission into Grok's image-generation capabilities. After the outcry, X disabled the chatbot's ability to create images of people in suggestive clothing, but regulators in France and Brussels are now examining whether the platform's AI tools breached European law.