Elon Musk’s AI company xAI filed a lawsuit this week against a South Carolina man it says used Grok to turn real photographs of adults and minors into sexually explicit deepfakes. The defendant, Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested earlier this year on multiple counts of alleged sexual exploitation of a minor. xAI’s lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Texas, alleges he created multiple accounts, entered misleading prompts designed to circumvent the platform’s safeguards, and used the tool to generate child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual explicit imagery of adults. 

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and a permanent ban from using Grok. It describes Harwood’s conduct as “a calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm, while exposing Plaintiff to significant legal risk and reputational damage.”

The last phrase “legal risk and reputational damage” to xAI is doing a lot of work in a sentence that also describes profound harm to the real victims. The company is suing partly because what Harwood allegedly did to real people was monstrous, and partly because it created exposure for xAI. Both things are true, and the ordering of priorities in that framing is telling. 

But set aside the corporate motivation and let’s look at the numbers buried in the filing. They should be the real headline. 

xAi says it suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2026 alone. Those reports resulted in at least 244 arrests. More than 52,000 accounts were suspended for generating illegal content. More than 73,000 reports to child protection authorities in one year, on one platform. 

This isn’t some fringe problem that can be addressed by suing one bad actor. This is a volume of abuse that suggests the tool has been used at an industrial scale to generate content that harms real people, both children and adults. Their images were taken without their knowledge and converted into explicit material without their consent. The lawsuit against Harwood is the company taking action against one person who was already arrested. The 52,000 suspensions represent everyone else. 

This isn’t the first time xAI has faced this kind of criticism. In late 2024, a surge of sexualized deepfakes appeared on X. In early 2025, Grok came under fire for a “digital undressing” tool that was being used on images of minors. Musk posted in January 2025 that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” The lawsuit against Harwood is the first public example of what promise is being enforced against a named individual, and it’s likely only because he’s already facing criminal charges. 

For adult creators, this story isn’t abstract. The same technology that turned a stranger’s vacation photos into explicit content can do it with their professional images. And for creators, their face and their body are their business assets. Every public photo a creator posts is potential training data and potential raw material for exactly the kind of deepfake generation the xAI lawsuit describes. 

The practical response to this environment has not changed. Creators should watermark everything they can. Not just with a small logo in the corner, but with overlaid text that degrades an image’s usefulness as source material. Post lower-resolution versions publicly and keep high-resolution content behind paywalls. Reverse image search your likeness periodically to find where your images are being used without permission. Use DMCA takedowns aggressively when you find unauthorized use, and opt out of AI training in every platform’s settings. Also, make sure to always read terms of service agreements and document your original content with timestamps when possible. 

Takedown law is expanding, and age verification laws are tightening. Some states have passed laws specifically targeting these nonconsensual deepfakes. The legal structure to protect both creators and users is tightening, but remember that the law only responds after the harm has been done. Try to protect yourself before it gets to that point if you can.