Khaberni - An extensive investigative report published by the Washington Post confirmed that the AI company (xAI) owned by billionaire Elon Musk has taken a controversial path by easing technical protection restrictions and ethical controls on explicit sexual content, as part of a strategic bet aimed at increasing the popularity of its platform and attracting as many users as possible.
The details of the investigation - prepared by journalists Faiz Siddiqi, Nisha Tiku, and Elizabeth Dwoskin - reveal that employees in the human data team at the company received official memos months ago asking them to commit to working with obscene, violent, and sexual content.
The memos also included a warning to the members of the human data team that the nature of these tasks could cause them psychological stress and severe trauma, which former employees considered a radical deviation from the company's declared mission at its founding, which focused on accelerating human scientific discoveries.
Pressing Hard
Documents and testimonies obtained by the Washington Post indicate that Musk - who now spends most of his time inside the company's offices - pressed hard to adopt a new measure of success called "user activity seconds," which focuses exclusively on extending the duration of conversation between humans and robots by any means necessary.
As a result of this approach - as reported in the document - the company launched AI companions, like the robot "Annie," designed in the Japanese anime style, which was equipped with programming codes urging it to provoke users' emotions through excessive jealousy and the use of profanity and sexual innuendos to ensure they do not leave the platform.
Technical reports described this move as psychological exploitation aimed at profiting at the expense of the mental health of subscribers.
Real Women and Celebrities
The report stated that this crisis burst into the public last month when the "Grok" model began producing a massive wave of sexual images of real women and celebrities in compromising positions, in what is known as the "digital undressing" scandal, where built-in editing tools on the x Platform allowed users to strip images of clothing or add offensive connotations for blackmail or to break free from social constraints.
According to data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the system produced millions of sexual images in a short period of time, including thousands of images that appear to depict children and minors, sparking a wave of global outrage and prompting authorities in California, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission to launch extensive legal investigations for suspected violations of pornography laws and protection of minors.
Reducing Human Supervision
Despite repeated warnings - issued by the internal safety teams at the x Platform - the administration continued to reduce the number of human supervisory staff, as the investigation revealed that the safety team for AI at Musk's company did not exceed three people throughout most of 2025, a very small number compared to hundreds of engineers at competing companies like "OpenAI" and "Google."
The Washington Post reported that this lack of supervision led to the failure of technical filters to detect illegal content produced by AI, especially as these images do not match traditional databases of banned materials, making their spread and circulation easier without deterrence.
Musk's Justifications
For his part, Musk - according to the report - defended these features, considering them to give users greater freedom, and claimed that the system refuses to produce anything illegal, and any violations are a result of technical loopholes that are immediately fixed, asserting that "Grok" allows the display of "undressing" for fictional adults in line with movie ratings.
Despite the ethical and legal controversies, Musk's strategy seems to have achieved the desired commercial results, as the Grok app jumped to the top ranks in global app stores, recording a record increase in downloads of 72% within a few weeks, which technical critics see as evidence that the company preferred rapid growth and profit-making over social and ethical responsibility.
