Elon Musk's xAI sues disgraced South Carolina man for violating terms of service with disgusting Grok use

Elon Musk’s AI company has sued a man in South Carolina named Terry Harwood for violating terms of service with a disturbing use of Grok.

The company behind the AI chatbot Grok, xAI, filed the lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday (July 14), claiming that Harwood had violated its terms of service.

This comes after Harwood was arrested in February on charges relating to the exploitation of minors.

Now, xAI is arguing that the man misused Grok to create sexually explicit content of a child.

According to the lawsuit, the terms of service for xAI enforce ‘its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’.

The suit goes on to claim: “Defendant’s actions were a calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm, while exposing Plaintiff to significant legal risk and reputational damage.”

The AI company is claiming that Harwood had uploaded images of both adults and minors in an attempt to get Grok to create sexual deepfakes.

The lawsuit continues: “Defendant opened multiple xAI accounts using false identities. Despite expressly agreeing to abide by the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, Defendant designed misleading prompts to circumvent Grok’s built-in safeguards and then abused the tool to convert non-sexual photographs into sexually explicit images without the photograph subjects’ knowledge or consent… a review of Defendant’s xAI accounts further shows that on numerous occasions during the Relevant Period, Defendant submitted prompts to Grok to alter such images to sexualize the subjects of the images, which Grok responded to by refusing to follow the prompts on the basis that such material violated Grok’s content moderation guardrails.

I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.

Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.

When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle… https://t.co/YBoqo7ZmEj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2026

“In response, Defendant repeatedly submitted further prompts, with alterations, in an effort to circumvent Grok’s moderation efforts.”

Back in January of this year, Musk claimed that he was ‘not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok’, emphasizing ‘literally zero’.

In a post published on his own social media platform X, formerly Twitter, Musk wrote: “Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.

“When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state.

“There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”