French prosecutors have opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk and his social media platform X, pursuing charges that include complicity in possessing and distributing child sexual abuse images, spreading non-consensual deepfake imagery, unlawfully collecting personal data, and denial of crimes against humanity — the last linked to posts by X's AI chatbot Grok that used language associated with Holocaust denial, which is a criminal offence in France. The Paris public prosecutor's office (France's leading criminal court jurisdiction) launched the probe in January 2025 through its cybercrime unit, after a French lawmaker raised concerns about biased algorithms on the platform and Grok subsequently generated posts suggesting Auschwitz gas chambers were used for disinfection rather than mass murder. Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino had been summoned for voluntary interviews but did not appear; French authorities said their absence would not impede the investigation, which has since been expanded and escalated to include an alert to the US Department of Justice over concerns that the deepfake controversy may have been deliberately orchestrated to inflate the valuations of X and xAI.