xAI has not said why it’s turning to litigation in certain cases or how it decides when to do so. The company did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment.
About two weeks before suing Bloodworth, xAI sued Terry Wayne Harwood, a South Carolina man also accused of using Grok to create CSAM. Harwood has also been criminally charged with sexual exploitation of a minor. The lawsuit makes the same allegations of breach of contract and uses language included verbatim in the later complaint against Bloodworth.
xAI is defending itself in multiple lawsuits over nude or explicit images generated by Grok without the subject’s consent, including the creation of child sexual abuse material.
One class action includes a plaintiff, referred to as South Carolina Roe, who claims that the perpetrator who used Grok to “nudify” images of her as a child was her father.
South Carolina Roe’s attorney, Sophia Rios, told POLITICO that xAI’s lawsuit against Harwood is “too little, too late.” The number of reports regarding Grok-created child sexual abuse material “indicates to me that the actual problem is with their product, which they should fix to prevent this conduct from happening in the first place,” she said.
xAI says in its complaints that the company “builds in technological safeguards to prevent bad actors from engaging in illegal, harmful, or abusive conduct, or otherwise attempting to violate its rules.”
The company is facing at least two other class actions regarding nudification. The company is also defending against at least four individual suits based on Bloodworth’s alleged crimes, with more expected, according to Derek Potts, an attorney representing alleged victims of Bloodworth. All of the cases essentially claim that xAI fails to use industry-standard safeguards used by other AI businesses to prevent the creation of sexualized, non-consensual deepfakes.
Potts told POLITICO the company’s lawsuits against the alleged perpetrators are an attempt to “try to point the finger elsewhere,” adding that he doubts the company can recover a significant sum from Bloodworth and Harwood.