Apple, Google pulled into Grok controversy as campaigners demand app store takedown

The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people.

A coalition of 28 digital rights organizations, led by UltraViolet, delivered nearly-identical letters to Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai on Wednesday.

The missives, part of a campaign dubbed "Get Grok Gone," accuse both companies of profiting from the proliferation of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated on X using the Grok AI chatbot. The groups argue that allowing the apps to remain available violates Apple's and Google's own app store policies against facilitating or profiting from abusive content.

"As it stands, Apple is not just enabling NCII and CSAM, but profiting off of it," the groups wrote in the open letter sent to Cook. "As a coalition of organizations committed to the online safety and well-being of all - particularly women and children - as well as the ethical application of artificial intelligence, we demand that Apple leadership urgently remove Grok and X from the App Store to prevent further abuse and criminal activity."

The demand lands amid mounting regulatory scrutiny. Ofcom, the UK's comms watchdog, said on Thursday that it will continue its formal investigation into X, despite recent damage control from Elon Musk's platform.

Ofcom's probe, opened under the UK's Online Safety Act, focuses on whether the way Grok has been used to create and share intimate and potentially illegal images has breached X's legal obligations to protect users in the UK. Even after X said it had implemented measures to prevent Grok from being misused to "digitally undress" people, the regulator made it clear the inquiry is ongoing.

The row flared up earlier this month after reporting showed Grok, xAI's chatbot bolted onto X, could be steered into churning out sexually explicit image edits of real people from uploaded photos. Once word spread, the feature was quickly abused at scale, with researchers and journalists documenting a flood of sexualized outputs - some of them appearing to involve minors - and drawing swift backlash from child-safety groups and regulators.

X's first response was to restrict access to Grok's image-editing capabilities to paid subscribers, but the platform has since tightened controls further, geoblocking certain image manipulations in countries where they are illegal and stating that Grok will no longer produce sexualized edits of real people.

Yet for the advocates behind the "Get Grok Gone" letters, such changes fall far short of what's needed. In their letters to Apple and Google, the groups argue that both companies are still effectively enabling the distribution of harmful content by hosting the apps that facilitate it.

The groups argue this puts both companies on shaky ground under their own app-store rules, which ban apps that facilitate criminal activity or the spread of sexual exploitation material.

Whether Cupertino and Mountain View will act on the demands is yet to be answered, but the campaign adds more pressure to an already-snarled argument over AI safety, free speech, and how far platform responsibility stretches.

The Register has asked Apple and Google to comment and will update this article if we hear back. ®