Indonesia and Malaysia block Grok over non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes

Officials from Indonesia and Malaysia have said they are temporarily blocking access to xAI’s chatbot Grok.

These are the most aggressive steps yet from government officials responding to a flood of sexualized, AI-generated images – often depicting real women and minors, and sometimes depict violence — posted by Grok in response to user requests on the social network X. (X and xAI are part of the same company.)

In a statement shared with the Guardian on Saturday and other publications, Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs, said: “The government considers the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes to be a serious violation of the human rights, dignity and security of citizens in the digital space.”

The ministry has also reportedly summoned X officials to discuss the matter.

The New York Times reports this the Malaysian government announced a similar ban on Sunday.

The government’s varied responses over the past week include an order from India’s IT ministry for

In the UK, communications regulator Ofcom has said it will “conduct a rapid assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview with Ofcom that he has “full support to take action.”

And while in the United States the Trump administration appears to be silent on the issue (xAI CEO Elon Musk is a major Trump donor and headed the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency last year), Democratic senators have appealed to Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.

xAI initially responded posting a seemingly personal apology to the Grok account, which acknowledges that a post “violates ethical standards and potentially U.S. laws” surrounding child sexual abuse material. Later, the AI ​​image generation feature was limited to paying subscribers to

In response to a post questioning why the UK government wasn’t taking action against other AI image generation tools: Musk wrote“They want any excuse for censorship.”

This post was first published on January 11. It has been updated to reflect Malaysia’s ban on Grok.