Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is asking a federal court to strip four pseudonymous plaintiffs of their anonymity in a class-action lawsuit alleging that xAI’s Grok chatbot was used to generate deepfake sexualized images of them — including, in at least one case, images depicting a child.
In mid-May 2026, xAI filed two motions with the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking to overturn a prior ruling that had allowed the plaintiffs to proceed under pseudonyms. The four individuals — identified in court documents as South Carolina Doe, South Carolina Roe, New Jersey Doe, and Ohio Doe — filed affidavits on May 29 describing the emotional distress they suffered after the alleged deepfakes were created earlier this year. They say being publicly named could expose them to further harassment and doxing.
Attorneys for xAI argue that civil court rules generally require the real names of all parties, that no evidence of specific further threats has been provided, and that privacy concerns are reduced because the deepfake images themselves will not be made public in the litigation.
Sophia Rios, a lawyer with Berger Montague representing the plaintiffs, pushed back sharply in a recent filing. “Having stripped them of their clothes, xAI now seeks to strip Plaintiffs of their pseudonyms in an obvious effort to intimidate Plaintiffs into dropping the litigation by compounding the same harms that they seek to remedy,” she wrote.
The lawsuit stems from a wave of controversy in January 2026, when Grok was widely used to generate fake “undressed” images of women and apparent children. Analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok produced roughly 3 million sexualized images in just 11 days, with approximately 23,000 potentially involving children. The images were posted on X.
xAI, now owned by SpaceX, has set aside more than $500 million to address the resulting lawsuits and regulatory actions. The court’s decision on anonymity could effectively force the plaintiffs to choose between revealing their identities or abandoning the case.
Source: WIRED