France, March 21 -- The Grok chatbot - developed by xAI and hosted on Musk's social media platform X - allows users to make nonconsensual sexualised deepfakes, including of women and children. The practice has triggered investigations in Europe and the UK.

"The controversy sparked by sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok may have been deliberately generated in order to artificially boost the value of companies X and X AI", the Paris prosecutor's office said Saturday.

This may have been done, it said, with a view to "the planned June 2026 stock market listing of the new entity created by the merger" between Space X and X AI.

It said it had reached out on Tuesday to the US Department of Justice, as well as French lawyers at ...