Centre flags misuse of X’s AI tool Grok, seeks urgent compliance report on obscene content

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has written to X Corp.’s Chief Compliance Officer, raising concerns over the alleged misuse of the platform’s AI-based service Grok and seeking an urgent Action Taken Report (ATR) for failure to meet statutory due diligence obligations under Indian law.

The letter, dated January 2, 2026, follows growing concerns over the use of AI tools to generate obscene and sexually explicit content involving women. Earlier in the day, Rajya Sabha MP and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi said she had sought the IT minister’s urgent intervention over what she described as increasing incidents of AI applications being prompted to sexualise and digitally undress women using unauthorised images. She stressed that AI features such as Grok must have guardrails that do not violate women’s dignity and said technology companies must take responsibility for preventing such misuse.

Responding to the question raised by MP Chaturvedi, the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw said that social media firms should take responsibility for content they publish and a standing committee has already recommended a tough law to fix accountability of platforms. The Centre has earlier this week warned online platforms -- mainly social media firms -- of legal consequences if they fail to act on obscene, vulgar, pornographic, paedophilic and other forms of unlawful content.

In its communication, MeitY said it had received repeated representations, including from parliamentary stakeholders, that content hosted on X may be violating laws related to decency and obscenity. The ministry stated that Grok, developed by xAI and integrated into X, was being misused to create fake accounts and to generate or manipulate images and videos of women in a derogatory and sexually explicit manner, including through synthetic outputs and prompt-based image manipulation.

Such incidents, MeitY said, point to serious shortcomings in platform-level safeguards and enforcement mechanisms and amount to gross misuse of artificial intelligence technologies. The ministry added that X, as a significant social media intermediary, appeared to be failing to adequately comply with provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.