UK PM Keir Starmer’s office says move to limit access to paying subscribers ‘insulting’ to victims and ‘not a solution’.
Published On 9 Jan 2026
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has limited image generation on the social media platform X amid growing backlash over its use to create sexualised deepfakes of women and children.
Grok told X users on Friday that image generation and editing features were now available only to paying subscribers.
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The standalone Grok app, which operates separately from X, still allows users to generate images without a subscription.
The move comes after Musk was threatened with fines and several countries pushed back publicly against the tool that allowed users to alter online images to remove the subjects’ clothes.
The European Commission said on Monday that such images circulating on X were unlawful and appalling.
The United Kingdom’s data regulator also said it had asked the platform to explain how it was complying with data protection laws following concerns that Grok was generating sexually abusive images of women.
On Friday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office called the move to limit access to paying subscribers “insulting” to victims and “not a solution”.
“That simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service,” a Downing Street spokesperson said. “It’s insulting the victims of misogyny and sexual violence.”
The EU executive, for its part, said it had “taken note of the recent changes”.
But EU digital affairs spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters, “This doesn’t change our fundamental issue, paid subscription or non-paid subscription.”
“We don’t want to see such images. It’s as simple as that,” he said, adding, “What we’re asking platforms to do is to make sure that their design, that their systems do not allow the generation of such illegal content.”
The European Commission has ordered X to retain all internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026 in response to the uproar about the sexualised images.
France, Malaysia and India have also criticised Musk’s platform over the issue.
Musk said last week that anyone using Grok to create illegal content would face the same consequences as uploading such material directly.
This is not the first time that Grok has been criticised, after the chatbot last year was slammed for providing anti-Semitic responses to questions from X users.
In July, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI disabled Grok’s text replies and deleted posts after the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler and made anti-Semitic remarks.
