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Calls for Legal Consequences Grow After Musk AI Bot Makes Suggestive Images of Children
"Musk is not cloaked in some federal immunity just because he's off-again/on-again buddies with Trump."
Jan 02, 2026
Elon Musk is facing calls for legal ramifications after Grok, the AI chatbot used on his X social media platform, produced sexually suggestive images of children.
Politico reported on Friday that the Paris prosecutor's office in France is opening an investigation into X after Grok, following prompts from users, created deepfake photographs of both adult women and underage girls that removed their clothes and replaced them with bikinis.
Politico added that the investigation into X over the images will "bolster" an ongoing investigation launched by French prosecutors last year into Grok's dissemination of Holocaust denial propaganda.
France is not the only government putting pressure on Musk, as TechCrunch reported on Friday that India's information technology ministry has given X 72 hours to restrict users' ability to generate content deemed "obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law."
Failure to comply with this order, the ministry warned, could lead to the government ending X's legal immunity from being sued over user-generated content.
In an interview with Indian cable news network CNBC TV18, cybersecurity expert Ritesh Bhatia argued that legal liability for the images generated by Grok should not just lie with the users whose prompts generated them, but with the creators of the chatbot itself.
"When a platform like Grok even allows such prompts to be executed, the responsibility squarely lies with the intermediary," said Bhatia. "Technology is not neutral when it follows harmful commands. If a system can be instructed to violate dignity, the failure is not human behavior alone—it is design, governance, and ethical neglect. Creators of Grok need to take immediate action."
Corey Rayburn Yung, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, argued on Bluesky that it was "unprecedented" for a digital platform to give "users a tool to actively create" child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
"There are no other instances of a major company affirmatively facilitating the production of child pornography," Yung emphasized. "Treating this as the inevitable result of generative AI and social media is a harrowing mistake."
Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, said that US states should use their powers to investigate X over Grok's generation of CSAM, given that it is unlikely the federal government under President Donald Trump will do so.
"Every state has its equivalent laws about this stuff," Craig explained. "Musk is not cloaked in some federal immunity just because he's off-again/on-again buddies with Trump."
Grok first gained the ability to generate sexual content this past summer when Musk introduced a new "spicy mode" for the chatbot that was immediately used to generate deepfake nude photos of celebrities.
Weeks before this, Grok began calling itself "MechaHitler" after Musk ordered his team to make tweaks to the chatbot to make it more "politically incorrect."
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Nearly 200 Killed in One Day in Pakistan Flooding Fueled by Climate Crisis
"The death toll may rise as we are still looking for dozens of missing people," said a spokesperson for an emergency agency in northwestern Pakistan.
Aug 15, 2025
Five people on a helicopter rescue team were among nearly 200 people killed by extreme rainfall and flooding in Pakistan in a single day on Friday—the country's latest emergency caused by increasingly severe monsoon seasons, which scientists say are being fueled by the human-caused climate crisis.
The vast majority of deaths were recorded in mountainous areas in the northwestern region, with at least 171 people killed on Friday in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
As the Associated Press reported, "cloudbursts," or sudden and intense downpours over small areas, have become increasingly common in India and northern Pakistan in recent years and have caused landslides and flooding.
Pakistan has faced more extreme heatwaves and abnormal torrential downpours during its monsoon season, which typically occurs from June-September. Glaciers like those in the Gilgit-Balistan region, which hold 75% of Pakistan's stored water supply, have also been melting faster due to higher temperatures—another cause of flash floods. Several landslides have been reported along the Karakoram Highway in that region, which is heavily used by tourists and for trade.
International scientists at the World Weather Attribution said last week that rainfall in Pakistan from June 24-July 23 was 10-15% higher than it would have been without planetary heating linked to fossil fuel emissions, which have steadily risen since the 1950s with wealthy countries including the United States being the biggest contributors.
The death toll from the current ongoing extreme weather, which is expected to continue in the coming days, will likely rise significantly, said officials on Friday.
Authorities suspended an annual Hindu pilgrimage to a Sufi shrine in the northwestern Buner district, which began July 25 and was supposed to continue until early September.
About 78 people have been killed in Buner, mostly by floodwaters that swept them away and houses that collapsed.
Officials were helping nearly 4,000 pilgrims evacuate the area on Friday, building makeshift bridges to help people cross waterways and using dozens of excavators to move boulders, uprooted trees, and other debris.
"The death toll may rise as we are still looking for dozens of missing people," provincial emergency service spokesperson Mohammad Suhail told the AP.
A merchant in the Buner district told the New York Times that he had lost thousands of dollars in goods.
"Everything I had, groceries, edible items, is destroyed," Syed Mehmood Bacah said. "I could not save anything."
The disaster comes three years after Pakistan's worst monsoon season on record, in which flooding killed more than 1,700 people and caused an estimated $40 billion in damages.
Pakistan has become the world's fifth-most vulnerable country to climate disasters despite contributing only about 1% of the world's fossil fuel emissions.
The National Disaster Management Authority said the total number of rain-related deaths has now reached at least 556 since June 26, with more than 700 people injured.
Northern India has also been affected by flash flooding this week, with at least 44 people killed and more than 100 others injured in the Indian-controlled part of Jammu and Kashmir.
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Watchdog Warns of Growing Global Threat as Nuclear-Armed Israel Attacks Iran
One SIPRI expert said the weapons "come with immense risks of escalation and catastrophic miscalculation—particularly when disinformation is rife—and may end up making a country's population less safe."
Jun 16, 2025
As Israel's assault on Iran generates global alarm, an international watchdog on Monday released an annual report warning that "a dangerous new nuclear arms race is emerging at a time when arms control regimes are severely weakened."
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's SIPRI Yearbook 2025 begins by acknowledging the 80th anniversary of the only times that nuclear weapons have been used in war: the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
"In those eight decades, a great deal of death and destruction has been meted out in war but the taboo against using nuclear weapons has survived and grown stronger," the yearbook says. "This is, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee noted when awarding the 2024 Peace Prize to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo, 'an encouraging fact.' Nonetheless, new risks mean it is worth reviewing today's nuclear challenge."
In addition to the United States, the confirmed nuclear-armed nations are China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The global inventory is an estimated 12,241 warheads, most of which belong to the U.S. and Russia, according to SIPRI. As of January, about 9,614 of the weapons were in military stockpiles for potential use, including 3,912 deployed with missiles and aircraft.
"There needs to be a new, general understanding that nuclear weapons do not buy security and their existence demands balanced behavior by political leaders."
"In 2024, global security showed no overall improvement and some deterioration compared to the previous year. Several armed conflicts—not least in Ethiopia, Gaza, Myanmar, and Sudan—continued to escalate," the report states. "Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine continued, confrontation over Taiwan deepened, tensions on the Korean peninsula sharpened, and global politics were marked by increasing divisiveness and polarization sown by, among other causes of disputation, Israel's devastating offensive in Gaza."
The yearbook flags "new uncertainties" stemming from the November 2024 election of U.S. President Donald Trump, pointing out how "both allies and adversaries of the USA and all those in between found themselves navigating uncharted geopolitical and economic waters" in the wake of the Republican's return to office in January.
"Bilateral nuclear arms control between Russia and the USA entered crisis some years ago and is now almost over," the document details. "The one remaining bilateral U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreement is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), agreed in 2010 and entering force in 2011, with a 10-year duration, extendable by five years upon mutual agreement."
Within days of U.S. President Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin extended the treaty, now set to expire early next year—and, as the report notes, "there is no sign of negotiations to renew or replace it, and no sign on either side of wanting to do so."
Concerns extend beyond the U.S. and Russia. Although "the world's nuclear weapon inventory has been shrinking for almost 40 years," the yearbook explains, "in the last few years, the number of nuclear weapons in military stockpiles (deployed warheads and those in central storage available for use) has started to increase," specifically in China and India.
Earlier this year, India and Pakistan engaged in armed conflict—which Matt Korda, associate senior researcher with SIPRI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Program and associate director for the Nuclear Information Project at Federation of American Scientists, pointed to in a Monday statement.
"The combination of strikes on nuclear-related military infrastructure and third-party disinformation risked turning a conventional conflict into a nuclear crisis," Korda said. "This should act as a stark warning for states seeking to increase their reliance on nuclear weapons."
"It is critical to remember that nuclear weapons do not guarantee security," said Korda. "As the recent flare-up of hostilities in India and Pakistan amply demonstrated, nuclear weapons do not prevent conflict. They also come with immense risks of escalation and catastrophic miscalculation—particularly when disinformation is rife—and may end up making a country’s population less safe, not more."
Highlighting signs of a new nuclear arms race "gearing up," the publication warns that "compared to the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious. Among the key points of competition will be technological capacities in cyberspace, outer space, and ocean space. Thus, the arms race may be more qualitative rather than quantitative, and the idea of who is ahead in the race will be even more elusive and intangible than it was last time round. In this context, the old largely numerical formulas of arms control will no longer suffice."
The report asserts that "there needs to be a new, general understanding that nuclear weapons do not buy security and their existence demands balanced behavior by political leaders. There also needs to be more training for diplomats in matters of nuclear arms control. This can make possible initial small steps towards reducing risk: hotlines, transparency, even informal understandings and formal agreements, such as no first use of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon free zones."
"These will form guardrails against disaster," SIPRI stressed. "Together with the voices of an informed public, they could also be part of building the pressure for the three great powers to take the next steps in reducing their nuclear arsenals."
The publication was released after the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reported last week that "in 2024, the nine nuclear-armed states spent more than $100 billion or $190,151 per minute—on their nuclear arsenals—an increase of 11% from the previous year."
SIPRI's report also comes as Israel faced global criticism for targeting Iranian nuclear power facilities and scientists.
Trump—who sabotaged the Iran nuclear deal during his first term—suggested Sunday that American forces "could get involved" to support Israel in the conflict, which has killed civilians in both countries. U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) on Monday introduced a war powers resolution intended to prevent the president from attacking Iran without congressional debate and authorization.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Monday that the nation's legislative body is now drafting a bill to withdraw from the landmark 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
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