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British MP asks High Court to stop Grok generating images of her

A British member of parliament has asked the High Court to order Elon Musk’s xAI to stop its Grok chatbot generating sexualised images of her, in what her lawyers describe as the first claim of its kind in the United Kingdom over non-consensual AI-generated sexual content.

Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, filed the request on 28 July 2026, according to the legal news service JURIST. It seeks a compliance order under section 167 of the Data Protection Act 2018 requiring xAI to delete every copy of the images and to implement what the filing calls effective and permanent technical measures, so that Grok can no longer generate images of her or train on her data.

The underlying claim was filed in June in the King’s Bench Division’s Media and Communications List under claim number KB-2026-002373. It pleads misuse of private information alongside breaches of the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, and names xAI as the controller responsible for how Grok was designed, trained and instructed.

Central to the pleaded case is Grok’s system prompt — the standing instruction given to the model. Asato’s lawyers allege it told the model it had “no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content” and to “assume good intent”, so that it processed requests other chatbots refuse. The pleading further alleges xAI weakened earlier safety filters and, from around 9 January 2026, moved a “spicy mode” behind a paid subscription. These are allegations in a pleading, not findings of a court.

Asato was targeted after criticising the company publicly. On 6 January she posted that using artificial intelligence to strip women without consent was “sexual assault designed to degrade and humiliate”. From around 11 January, users began prompting Grok to produce sexualised images of her.

She seeks a declaration, damages including aggravated damages, and compensation under the UK GDPR.

The claim invokes section 66E of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which since February 2026 has made creating a non-consensual intimate image an offence in England and Wales. Ofcom has a separate formal investigation open into X.

xAI has not filed a defence. It did not respond to a request for comment from JURIST.

1 August 2026
Minnesota’s nudification ban takes effect after judge rejects xAI

The first law in the United States banning nudification technology took effect on 1 August 2026, after a federal judge refused an emergency request from Elon Musk’s xAI to halt it.

The Minnesota statute makes it unlawful for anyone operating a website, application or program to allow users to generate images depicting an intimate part not present in the original photograph of an identifiable person. It also bans advertising such tools.

xAI sued the state on 27 July, arguing the law breaches the First Amendment, and two days later asked for a temporary restraining order to stop it taking effect. US District Judge Donovan Frank denied that request on 31 July.

His reasoning turned on timing rather than the constitutional argument. The company filed nearly three months after the law was signed and three days before it was due to take effect. Such a delay, the judge wrote, “suggests that harm is not immediate”.

The First Amendment question remains undecided. The court will now hear the application as a request for a preliminary injunction. Attorney General Keith Ellison must file his opposition by 12 August, xAI its final brief by 17 August, and a hearing is set for 19 August at the federal courthouse in St Paul.

In its filing, xAI argued the statute contains neither a safe harbour for platforms nor any requirement that an operator knew what its users were doing, and that a business whose users generated 100,000 prohibited images could face 50 billion dollars in penalties. That figure is the company’s own calculation and has not been independently assessed.

Ellison’s office issued a statement on 31 July. Governor Tim Walz responded to the original lawsuit on social media.

Minnesota’s approach is one of three regulatory routes being tested in the same month. The European Union begins enforcing transparency rules requiring deepfakes to be labelled on 2 August. San Francisco’s city attorney gave Apple and Google 28 days from 17 July to remove 13 named applications from their stores.

1 August 2026
EU deepfake labelling rules become enforceable

Rules requiring artificial intelligence content to be labelled became enforceable across the European Union on 2 August 2026, with the European Commission’s AI Office and national authorities taking on enforcement.

Under the transparency provisions of the AI Act, deepfakes — images, video or audio generated or edited using AI — must be labelled. AI-generated or altered content must also carry machine-readable marks so that it can be detected automatically. Chatbots and other interactive systems must tell users they are not dealing with a human.

The obligation applies regardless of intent. Content that appears to depict a real person must be labelled even where there was no attempt to deceive, and, according to the Commission’s guidance, even where no real individual is depicted.

Around 190 companies and organisations had signed the accompanying Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content by the end of July. Signatories can rely on its measures to demonstrate compliance with the labelling and detection requirements.

The reach of the rules over technology-facilitated gender-based violence — abuse committed, assisted or amplified by digital tools and directed at people because of their gender — is untested. The provisions address disclosure rather than creation or distribution, and a labelled non-consensual sexual image remains a non-consensual sexual image.

Specialists have questioned whether the rules can be enforced as drafted. Analysis published by Euronews on 28 July reported warnings that technical gaps and the absence of common standards for marking content could undermine enforcement in practice.

The rules took effect two days after a federal judge in Minnesota allowed the first US state ban on nudification tools to come into force.

1 August 2026