Apple reportedly threatened to remove Elon Musk’s Grok app from its store amid accusations that its developers failed to address concerns about nonconsensual deepfakes.
In a letter sent on January 30, Apple told three Democratic senators that it had “contacted the teams behind both X and Grok after it received complaints and saw news coverage of the scandal.”
Apple demanded in a letter to Grok’s developers that the company develop a plan to improve content moderation, which NBC News obtained.
The tech company argued that the Grok app may breach the App Store’s stringent guidelines, which forbid applications from displaying “offensive, insensitive, upsetting” content.
In a follow-up message, Apple reportedly confirmed that it had rejected a revised version of the Grok app, which it described as “out of compliance.”
“As a result, we rejected the Grok submission and notified the developer that additional changes to remedy the violation would be required, or the app could be removed from the App Store,” the message read.
An updated version of the X app was approved, although the social media platform allows users to use Grok’s technology.
Eventually, a version of the Grok app, which was “substantially improved,” was also approved by Apple, according to the letter.
According to NBC News, the letter was allegedly sent to Senators Ron Wyden, Ed Markey and Ben Ray Luján, weeks after they urged Google and Apple to remove Grok from their app stores.
At the time, Grok had been accused of generating sexualised images of people without their consent. Some of the images were alleged to have depicted children.
In January 2026, a 22-year-old woman named Evie told The Independent that she had been bombarded with more than 100 sexualised images of herself on X in less than a week. In one image, she had been digitally stripped naked.
In mid-January, X shared a statement in which the company stated that it had prevented Grok’s account from “allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis.”
“Additionally, we will geoblock in jurisdictions where such content is illegal, the ability of all users in those locations to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire in Grok on X, and xAI is implementing similar geoblocking measures for the Grok app,” the statement continued.
The ability to create or edit images with the Grok tool was also limited to paid subscribers, according to the statement.
However, cybersecurity sources told The Verge that they had used the AI tool to generate explicit images of celebrities and political figures in recent weeks.
A review by NBC News found that dozens of AI-generated sexual images and videos depicting real women were posted on X in the past month.
Some of the images saw women reportedly being edited into sports bras, bunny costumes, towels and Spider-Woman outfits. Many of the women in the images were reportedly female pop stars and actors.
In response to the NBC News report, X shared in a statement that it prohibits “users from generating non-consensual explicit deepfakes and from using our tools to undress real people.”
“xAI has extensive safeguards in place to prevent such misuse, such as continuous monitoring of public usage, analysis of evasion attempts in real time, frequent model updates, prompt filters, and additional safeguards,” the statement continued.
The Independent has contacted X and Apple for comment.
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