The Paris prosecutor's office in France announced Wednesday that it has formally opened a criminal investigation into social platform X (formerly Twitter) and its owner Elon Musk, and is seeking to file charges. The accusations include conspiracy to possess and distribute child sexual abuse images, producing and distributing sexualized deepfake content, denial of crimes against humanity, and organized manipulation of automated data processing systems—among other serious offenses. The investigation originated from a targeted operation launched by the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime division in January, and investigators searched X's offices in France in February.
According to prosecutors, in March the Paris prosecutor's office sent alerts to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, raising concerns that sexualized deepfake images generated by xAI's AI chatbot Grok "may have been deliberately manipulated to artificially inflate the valuation of X and xAI," potentially constituting criminal conduct. Grok had previously sparked global outrage on the X platform for producing non-consensual sexualized deepfakes at user request. Musk himself was summoned after the search.
