The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has issued a notice to X (formerly Twitter), demanding immediate action against the misuse of its AI chatbot Grok for creating and disseminating obscene, nude, and sexually explicit content. The letter, dated today, accuses the platform of failing to uphold statutory due diligence under the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, particularly in preventing AI-generated deepfakes that “undress” or denigrate women.
The controversy stems from widespread incidents of of users exploiting Grok to manipulate images and videos, including those of real women, into derogatory and vulgar forms. Users are replying to photographs of women and prompting Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to change the women’s clothing into bikinis, or into something more revealing and explicit. While most other AI tools have censorship rules in place to prevent such manipulations, Grok has no such restrictions, and the tool is generating images of women in revealing outfits like micro bikinis. Moreover, most other AI tools operate in private chats, even if they generate such images, they are visible only to the user. But images generated by Grok on X are publicly visible.
MeitY highlighted that such content violates women’s dignity, privacy, and safety, normalizing digital harassment and exploitation. The ministry referenced prior advisories, including one from December 29, 2025, urging platforms to strengthen content moderation.
In the directive, signed by Joint Secretary Ajit Kumar, X is instructed to conduct a comprehensive review of Grok’s prompt-processing, output-generation, and safety guardrails, so that the application does not generate, promote or facilitate content that contains nudity, sexualisation, sexually explicit or otherwise unlawful content in any form whatsoever. The ministry has also directed ? to enforce user policies with suspensions for violators, and remove existing unlawful content immediately.
The social media platform has been asked to submit a detailed Action Taken Report (ATR) within 72 hours. Failure to comply could result in the loss of safe harbour protections under Section 79 of the IT Act, along with actions under laws like the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.
