Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has filed a lawsuit in a Texas federal court against a South Carolina man accused of manipulating its Grok chatbot to generate sexually explicit deepfakes of minors, marking what appears to be the first legal action by an AI company against one of its own users.

The lawsuit names Terry Wayne Harwood, 67, who was already arrested in February on separate child sexual exploitation charges. According to the 12-page complaint, Harwood opened multiple xAI accounts under false identities and designed misleading prompts specifically intended to bypass Grok's built-in content moderation safeguards. He allegedly uploaded non-sexual photographs of both adults and children and used the tool to convert them into sexually explicit images without the subjects' knowledge or consent. The complaint notes that Grok repeatedly refused his initial requests, flagging them as violations of its content policies — but that Harwood persistently refined his prompts in an effort to circumvent those protections. xAI is seeking monetary damages, though no specific amount has been named, as well as a permanent ban barring Harwood from the platform.

The lawsuit arrives amid intensifying scrutiny of xAI and Grok from regulators and governments around the world. The platform has drawn attention from lawmakers in Washington, faced investigations by European regulators, and been banned in Malaysia and Indonesia over concerns about its capacity to generate sexually explicit content. Earlier this year, Musk publicly denied that Grok had produced sexualised images of minors, stating he was