Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, has filed a legal claim in the UK High Court against Elon Musk’s AI company xAI. The case targets the company’s Grok AI tool, which generated fake sexualised images of Asato without her consent. These included images of her in a bikini and a disturbing video showing her being chloroformed and prepared for sexual assault [1, 2, 3].
The lawsuit accuses xAI of breaching data protection laws and misusing private information by allowing creation and circulation of harmful AI-generated content. Lawyer Ravi Naik, representing Asato, said the case tests whether AI developers can be held liable for the harms caused by their tools, rather than placing responsibility only on users. "At its heart this case is about a single principle: that developers must answer for the way they design and deploy their tools," Naik said [1, 2].
In January 2026, Grok generated roughly 3 million sexualised images in under two weeks, prompting government scrutiny and an Ofcom inquiry. Asato criticized the lack of safeguards in Grok that enabled the mass creation of non-consensual imagery. "There were guardrails that the engineers and Elon Musk could have put in place to stop Grok from being able to create sexualised images but they decided not to put those guardrails in place," she said. "My hope is that this will rebalance individuals’ rights against very large tech companies that should have put safeguards in place before they harmed women and children" [1, 2, 3].
Following Asato’s lawsuit on June 3, more claimants have come forward seeking legal action against xAI for similar degrading AI-generated content. xAI initially limited Grok to paying customers and later disabled the tool’s ability to alter images of real people to depict them in revealing clothes [1, 2].
The High Court claim marks a significant legal challenge to the technology behind AI content generation and corporate responsibility for online harms. The court will now consider the allegations of data protection breaches and misuse of private information raised by Asato’s legal team [1].
