The European Union gave the middle finger to the Trump administration on Monday when its leaders announced a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X over the spread of illicit content generated by artificial intelligence.
The EU alleges that X’s AI chatbot, Grok — which has generated numerous controversies in the past several months involving sexually explicit images, including ones depicting children — has violated the EU’s Digital Services Act, which is designed to curb the spread of abusive and manipulative content online. Just last month, the EU fined X $140 million for what it called the “deceptive design” of Musk’s verified user feature and a failure to comply with the DSA’s transparency rules.
“We believe that X may have breached the DSA,” a spokesperson said in a video announcement posted Monday. “We have seen over the last weeks and months antisemitic content. We have seen nonconsensual deepfakes of women. And we have seen child sexual abuse material.”
I’ve previously written about the widely publicized incidents in which Grok was found spreading antisemitism and other forms of hate speech, as well as the more recent incidents involving people using the chatbot to generate deepfake pornography — including child porn.
The EU has insisted that it will maintain complete independence as it weighs its rules regarding Big Tech. But the Trump administration has essentially done everything in its power to impose its will on behalf of the Big Tech oligarchs — including Musk, the multibillionaire whom Trump tapped to lead his so-called Department of Government Efficiency to fire thousands of federal civil servants — who are presently major GOP donors.
In December, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick openly declared that EU countries would need to weaken their tech regulations for relief from Trump’s steel tariffs. More recently, a top State Department official issued a threat that “nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” suggesting the department views efforts to rein in abusive pornographic material as an infringement on free speech rights. Nonetheless, for now it appears the EU’s Grok probe is pushing along undeterred. X did not respond to my request for comment on whether it views anti-sex abuse measures as an unlawful infringement on speech rights. In response to my request for comment on the EU’s probe, a company spokesperson shared a link to a company webpage on safety that says the platform has a zero tolerance policy for “any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.” In a news release announcing the investigation, Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said: Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
