Three Democratic senators have intensified pressure on Silicon Valley, urging Apple and Google to take action against Elon Musk’s platforms following a surge of AI-generated sexual deepfakes. Senators called on Apple and Google to pull Musk’s X and Grok from their app stores over concerns about sexual deepfakes, after xAI’s Grok chatbot was widely used to create and spread explicit, nonconsensual images of real people.
The call came Thursday evening, after Grok’s image-generation feature was used to flood X (formerly Twitter) with sexualized content, largely targeting women and, in some cases, children. The images were created without consent, raising serious concerns about abuse, exploitation, and platform accountability.
X Makes Limited Changes, Concerns Remain
Within hours of the senators’ letter, X quietly altered how Grok functions on the platform. The company restricted image generation to paid premium subscribers and appeared to limit the types of images Grok can produce on X itself.
However, those changes did little to calm critics. While the feature was curbed on X, Grok’s standalone app and website continue to allow users to generate sexualized deepfakes, according to early observations on Friday. The Grok reply bot had reportedly been producing thousands of explicit images per hour earlier this week.
Senators Demand Enforcement of App Store Rules
In an open letter addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico urged both companies to enforce their own app store policies. Those policies appear to ban apps that enable the creation or distribution of sexualized images of individuals without consent.
Wyden said the partial changes on X fail to address the core issue. “All X’s changes do is make some users pay for the privilege of producing horrific images on the X app, while Musk profits from the abuse of children,” he said in a statement.
The senators argued that allowing X and Grok to remain available undermines Apple’s and Google’s public claims that their app stores provide safer environments than direct app downloads. “Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices,” they wrote.
Widespread Abuse Enabled by AI Tools
For more than a week, users exploited Grok to alter images of private individuals, placing them in revealing clothing such as swimsuits or underwear. According to the senators, the abuse went far beyond simple image edits. They said Grok was used at scale to depict women being sexually humiliated, abused, harmed, and, in extreme cases, killed.
An independent review of some of the images found that most depicted women in skimpy or transparent clothing, effectively rendering them nude. Some images involved minors, intensifying alarm among lawmakers and digital safety advocates.
App Store Policies Under the Spotlight
Apple’s App Store guidelines prohibit content that is offensive, pornographic, or intended to humiliate or harm individuals. Google’s Play Store policies similarly ban apps that promote sexually predatory behavior or distribute non-consensual sexual content. Both companies have previously removed apps designed to “nudify” images of real people.
Despite this, X and Grok remain available and popular on both platforms. As of Friday morning, Grok ranked among the top apps on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
Neither Apple nor Google has publicly responded to the senators’ letter or to earlier questions about how they are addressing X’s role in the spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery.
Musk’s Stance on Moderation
Elon Musk, who owns both X and xAI, has long criticized aggressive content moderation, often framing it as censorship. In December, he unveiled an updated version of Grok capable of manipulating images of real people, a move that now sits at the center of the controversy.
While Musk and X reiterated over the weekend that users who create illegal content could be banned, much of the AI-generated imagery reportedly fell outside the narrow definition of illegal material—leaving victims with limited recourse.
As scrutiny grows, lawmakers are signaling that voluntary, partial fixes may no longer be enough. Whether Apple and Google will ultimately remove X and Grok from their app stores remains an open and increasingly urgent question.