Paris prosecutors have raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, as part of a cyber crime investigation, it said on Tuesday.
The tech billionaire has also been summoned to a “voluntary” hearing in April, following a year-long investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms by X and its executives.
Investigators later widened the probe to include complaints over the site’s AI chatbot, Grok. They will look into the creation of child abuse images and sexually explicit deepfakes without people’s consent.
The investigation, which an EU commission spokesperson said is being discussed between Brussels and Paris, will see tensions rise between Europe and the US over Big Tech and free speech.
“At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory,” the prosecutor’s office said. It added that the police’s National Cyber Unit along with Europol were involved in the investigation.
Mr Musk has been called to voluntarily speak at a hearing on 20 April along with the former CEO of X Corp, Linda Yaccarino.
While several investigations have been opened into Grok’s parent company xAI, it marks the first time the 54-year-old has been summoned by prosecutors in relation to the scandal.
The prosecutors office said it will now be leaving Mr Musk’s social media platform, and that it would only be communicating on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.
The Independent has received no response to a request to X for comment, but in July the company said French prosecutors were launching a “politically-motivated criminal investigation”.
The billionaire has faced intense scrutiny from governments around the world about sexualised images generated and edited using Grok.
Sexually explicit images were created of real women without their consent, before the company finally “implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing” in mid-January.
But campaigners and victims said this came too late to undo the harm done.
On Tuesday, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) also opened in investigation into Grok’s parent company xAI and X, saying they raise “serious concerns under UK data protection law and presents a risk of significant potential harm to the public”.
It will also investigate whether Grok put the “necessary safeguards” in place to prevent this.
The European Commission and UK regulator Ofcom had previously announced an investigations into xAI.
In its rebuttal from July, X claimed the French investigation “egregiously undermines X’s fundamental right to due process and threatens our users’ rights to privacy and free speech”.
It claimed there were “serious concerns about the impartiality, fairness, and political motivations of the investigation” because of the involvement of several experts who have been critical of the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“X believes that this investigation is distorting French law in order to serve a political agenda and, ultimately, restrict free speech,” it added. “For these reasons, X has not acceded to the French authorities’ demands, as we have a legal right to do.”
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