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Two major countries have officially blocked Elon Musk's Grok in a landmark decision.
Ever since the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok launched in November 2023, it's been known for grabbing major public attention and not in the good sense.
Last year, the xAI LLM was under fire after being repeatedly caught sharing far-right political notions including praise of Adolf Hitler and claims of a 'white genocide' in South Africa.
More recently, Grok received probably its worst backlash to date when the chatbot responded to user prompts to morph NSFW images of young women against their consent and create 'criminal imagery of children' aged between 11 and 13.
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In response, X and Elon Musk are being pressured by the UK government and PM Keir Starmer to remove the ability to generate such images immediately, calling them 'disgraceful' and 'disgusting,' or the platform risks being banned outright in one of its biggest markets.
But a Grok ban has already taken effect in two Southeast Asian countries.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first nations to block the AI tool over its recent controversy.
The app is accessible through CEO Elon Musk's social media platform X and has been used to generate thousands of images of real people in revealing outfits, including children.
Both countries announced the bans over the weekend, while regulators in the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada and India are considering similar actions.
According to Indonesia’s communication and digital affairs minister Meutya Hafid, the ban is to 'protect women, children and the broader public from the risks of fake pornographic content generated using artificial intelligence technology.'
Similarly, Malaysian officials stated that the ban addresses 'the repeated misuse of Grok to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive, and non-consensual manipulated images, including content involving women and minors.'
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said it had issued notices to X and xAI calling for more effective safeguards against users creating sexually explicit deepfakes and urged the public to report harmful online content.
UK regulator Ofcom has also launched an investigation into X over potential breaches of the Online Safety Act.
“I would remind xAI that the Online Safety Act includes the power to block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law," said UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall. “If Ofcom decide to use those powers they will have our full support [...] We are in the coming weeks bringing in to force powers to criminalise the creation of intimate images without consent.”
