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 by prosecutors to appear in April, following a year-long investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms by X and its executives.
Prosecutors said on Tuesday they have widened the investigation following complaints over the site’s AI chatbot, Grok. Investigators will look into the creation of child abuse images and the violation of a person’s image rights with sexually explicit deepfakes, along with other potential crimes.
The probe, 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.
Musk’s call to speak at a hearing on 20 April will be “for the purpose of voluntary interviews”.
The prosecutors office said it would be leaving X after making the announcement, and that it would only be communicating on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.
The Independent has reached out to X for comment. Denying the accusations in July, the company said French prosecutors were launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation".
In its rebuttal from July, X claimed the 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.”
The investigation now includes the use of the Grok AI tool, following 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.
Many campaigners and victims said this came too late to undo the harm done.
The European Commission announced an investigation into Grok’s parent company, xAI over the images, after the UK’s Ofcom opened a similar investigation.
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