Commission meeting with X in wake of Grok AI antisemitism scandal

The Commission held a meeting with representatives of X on Tuesday morning over Grok, the AI chatbot that's integrated into the social media platform, after the technology was seen making a flurry of hate speech outbursts last week. 

Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier, confirmed to Euractiv that a "technical" meeting will take place between its officials and representatives of X over Grok.

The meeting comes after the chatbot reportedly spread antisemitic and hateful prompts on X, including posts that appeared to celebrate Hitler. X has since taken down abusive content generated by the AI chatbot and, in a post on X on Saturday, Grok's developers tried to frame the episode as an "abuse" of the AI's functionality, rather than a design flaw.

Despite Grok being caught spewing hate speech, the Commission has not clarified whether today's technical meeting will specifically address this topic. "As with any other designated platform, this is a usual step in the Commission's supervisory work," Regnier said.

Since the Grok hate speech incident, the Polish Deputy Prime Minister has sent a letter to Tech Commissioner, Virkkunen, urging the EU to investigate Grok's outburst under the Digital Services Act (DSA). "What we are seeing from X right now could be considered a major infringement of the DSA," he wrote.

In the same week, the Paris prosecutor's office opened an official investigation into X and its owner, Elon Musk, alleging algorithmic manipulation and fraudulent data extraction as part of organised crime, among other suspicions.

X has been under investigation by the Commission since December 2023, over a raft of suspected DSA breaches. In July 2024 the EU confirmed some violations. However – so far – X has not been issued with any DSA fines.

"France is stepping in where Europe should [be]," said Renew lawmaker Sandro Gozi, in response to news of the Paris investigation.

"It's been almost 600 days since the European Commission launched its own probe into X. And still, nothing," he added.

The Commission has said that its services are consistently "in touch with X" – a point Virkkunen reiterated during a press conference on Monday.

X was contacted about today's technical meeting with the EU but the company offered no standalone comment – merely pointing back to its existing X post about the Grok episode.

(nl)