NEW DELHI — The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a directive to X Corp on Friday to stop the generation and circulation of obscene, nude, and indecent content on its platform. The government ordered X Corp to submit an action taken report within 72 hours, demanding “immediate compliance for prevention of hosting, generation, publication or transmission, sharing or uploading of obscene, nude, indecent and explicit content through the misuse of AI-based services like ‘Grok’ and xAI’s other services.”
The directive warns that “non-compliance with these requirements shall be viewed seriously and may result in strict legal consequences against your platform, its responsible officers and the users on the platform who violate the law, without any further notice, under the IT Act, the IT Rules, the BNSS, the BNS and other applicable laws.”
X must now conduct a comprehensive review of Grok’s technical and governance frameworks to stop the creation of unlawful content. The platform is required to enforce strict user policies, including the suspension and termination of violators, and must remove offending content immediately without tampering with evidence.
The ministry stated that the platform has not adequately adhered to regulatory provisions regarding obscene, vulgar, pornographic, or harmful content. These failures “have the effect of violating the dignity, privacy and safety of women and children, normalizing sexual harassment and exploitation in digital spaces, and undermining the statutory due diligence framework applicable to intermediaries operating in India.”
Specific misuse was identified within the Grok AI service, where users have generated derogatory or vulgar images and videos of women. This includes “the creation of fake accounts” and targeting women “through prompts, image manipulation, and synthetic outputs.” The government characterized this as a “gross misuse of artificial intelligence technologies in violation of applicable laws.”
Non-compliance may lead to the loss of safe harbor protections under Section 79 of the IT Act and trigger penal action under the BNS, the Indecent Representation of Women Act, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. Coordinated action is being signaled across multiple ministries and state authorities. (Source: IANS)
