French police raid X offices and summon Musk in probe involving sexual deepfakes

French police on Tuesday raided the Paris offices of the social media giant X and summoned its multibillionaire owner, Elon Musk, for questioning as part of a cybercrime investigation into artificial intelligence-generated pornographic deepfakes and Holocaust denial.

Musk and his AI company xAI, which created the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok that is available to users on the X platform, have come under scrutiny for troves of AI-generated sexually explicit images and videos. Some of the deepfakes, prosecutors said, appeared to depict minors.

Grok has also come under fire for spreading misinformation, including about race and the Holocaust, in answers to X users. France announced in November that it is investigating X for Grok’s French-language postings that cast doubt on the use of gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

The raid Tuesday was part of an investigation led by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office with the support of the French cybercrime unit and Europol.

Authorities are investigating a range of suspected criminal offenses, including the “dissemination of illegal content and other forms of online criminal activity,” Europol said in a statement Tuesday.

X did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment. X’s lawyer in France, Kami Haeri, told The Associated Press. “We are not making any comment at this stage.”

France is not alone in its investigation of the platform. The European Union opened a formal investigation into X last month, and European regulators widened a separate investigation into the platform’s content recommendation system.

And on Tuesday, Britain’s chief data privacy regulator opened a formal investigation into Musk’s X and xAI companies over their use of personal data in relation to Grok’s production of sexually explicit images and video.

Musk and the former CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, were both asked to appear for voluntary interviews on April 20, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. Several other X employees have also been asked to provide witness statements.

Musk’s name appears in the latest trove of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released by the Department of Justice last week. In one 2012 exchange, Musk asks Epstein when the “wildest party” on his private island will be. It’s unclear whether such a visit took place. Appearing in the documents does not provide direct evidence of wrongdoing.