Inside Grok’s pivot to porn — all in a bid to keep users engaged and away from the AI system’s original purpose

Former employees have alleged that the chatbot’s ongoing scandals over sexualized images are a direct result of Musk’s drive to corner the market in lewd AI

For weeks, Elon Musk's struggling AI chatbot Grok has been engulfed by a rolling international scandal over its willingness to generate sexualized images of real people — and even children — on demand.

Now, insiders allege that the problem came from the very top.

According to an investigation by The Washington Post, Grok's behavior was the direct consequence of a relentless drive by Musk himself to sex up the chatbot's output to boost its flagging popularity.

Under this pressure, Grok's maker xAI allegedly slashed safeguards against sexual material, trained the chatbot to engage in lewd conversations, and ignored employees' warnings about the potential consequences.

Some employees were allegedly asked to sign a waiver stating that they were willing to work with "sensitive, violent, sexual, and/or other offensive or disturbing content", and that they understood this may be "disturbing, traumatizing", or cause them "psychological stress."

Grok's parent company xAI has recently expanded into romantically-tinged AI companions as a new line of business (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The result, former employees claimed, was a flood of AI-generated porn that overwhelmed xAI's content moderators, already much reduced by Musk's slash-and-burn takeover of Twitter (now renamed X and rolled into xAI) back in 2022.

The Independent has asked xAI for comment.

Authorities around the world have banned, restricted, or launched investigations into Grok's salacious deepfakes, which include numerous images of real people edited to show them in skimpy outfits or suggestive situations.

Among those people was Ashley St. Clair, a former partner of Musk currently battling for custody over their young son, who has sued xAI for allowing users to generate sexualized and antisemitic images of her — including one based on a photo taken when she was only 14.

Indeed, research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate — a longtime critic of Musk and his companies — estimated that Grok had generated more than 3 million “sexualized images” and 25,000 such images involving children in the space of just 11 days.

The Post's story on Monday was based on interviews with at least seven anonymous former employees of X or xAI, as well as "people familiar with Musk's thinking" and leaked documents.

Those sources alleged that in around May and June last year, Musk — recently ejected from government service and feuding with Donald Trump — began spending huge amounts of time at xAI's offices and pressuring employees to increase user engagement.

"There’s no question that he is intimately involved with Grok — with the programming of it, with the outputs of it," St. Clair told the Post.

At the time, Grok was consistently lagging behind ChatGPT on Apple's iPhone app store charts and struggling to gain the same level of widespread usage as its rivals.

Musk's solution, reportedly, was a far cry from his original intended purpose for Grok: as a more "truth-seeking" alternative to other AI systems captured by what he calls "the woke mind virus".

Instead, he reportedly told engineers to lean into sexual features designed to keep users hooked, such as bawdy AI girlfriends and boyfriends and explicit AI-generated images.

Safety-focused employees reportedly tried to warn that this could cause huge problems. But xAI's entire safety team allegedly only had two or three members for most of 2025, far fewer than other companies, and their efforts were not heeded.

Still, the push appears to have worked: as of Monday, Grok was ranked #6 on Apple's U.S. free apps chart, a massive improvement since December.

xAI has said it will block users' ability to create sexualized images of real people in countries where that would be illegal, while attempting to hire more safety experts.

Musk, for his part, has insisted that he is "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok" and said Grok's U.S. version will allow "upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans" but nothing further.