Pressure is mounting on X as a coalition of women’s groups and safety campaigners urge Apple and Google to pull the platform, and its Grok AI, after a surge in sexualised deepfakes.

In open letters addressed to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai, twenty-eight advocacy groups, including the likes of UltraViolet, Choose Democracy, the National Organization for Women, and Friends of the Earth, demanded they take “immediate action” to remove the Grok chatbot from their firm’s app stores.

The campaigners wrote that, because Grok is available both through a standalone app as well as being directly integrated into X, the companies should “immediately remove access to both apps”.

Citing a spate of research and recent headlines surrounding the prolific creation of harmful sexualised imagery linked to Grok, the campaigners said that Elon Musk’s move to restrict image generation and AI editing to paid subscribers “does nothing but monetise” nonconsensual intimate images (NCII).

Going further, the groups said that because the sexualised content Grok has reportedly made goes against both Apple’s and Google’s guidelines, both firms are “not just enabling NCII and CSAM [child sexual abuse material], but profiting off of it”.

While, as of writing, neither Google nor Apple had responded to the open letters, this is just the latest wave of intense blowback faced by X in recent days.

In the US, where Elon Musk’s on-again-off-again relationship with President Trump makes some lawmakers more wary of rebuke, some Senators have already joined the call for X to be booted from app stores with their own open letter to Cook and Pichai.

Even more telling, Senators this week also voted unanimously for legislation allowing victims of nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI images to sue those behind them, in what is viewed as a direct response to the deepfake crisis sparked by Grok.

Elsewhere, others have taken a stronger stance, with the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia blocking access to Grok in a world first, specifically citing its use to generate harmful content, with Malaysia saying the bot would be restricted until more effective safeguards are put in place.

The UK government have taken a more cautious approach, despite having previously introduced a slew of new legislation designed to tackle the proliferation of harmful, “nudifying” tools.

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While stopping short of an outright ban, prime minister Keir Starmer said that X could lose the “right to self-regulate” if it didn’t wrangle back control of the Grok bot, and Ofcom launched an investigation into the social platform to determine whether it has complied with its legal duties under the Online Safety Act. 

Facing calls from opposition parties to restrict X while that investigation is underway, the government’s tech secretary, Liz Kendall, released her own letter giving more detail on Labour’s plans to tackle non-consensual AI deepfakes.

“Ofcom has the mandate it needs to hold services to account for horrific illegal content on their sites and they have the government’s unequivocal backing to use the full force of the powers that Parliament has granted them, up to and including, if they deem necessary, the power to apply to the courts to block services from being accessed in the UK if they refuse to comply with UK law,” said Kendall.

“The government expects Ofcom to act urgently and to set out a timeline for their investigation as soon as possible. This is what members of the public – and most importantly, the victims – expect.”