8 January 2026 Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has raised a substantial $20 billion (€17 billion) in its latest funding round. Despite criticism of the chatbot Grok for generating inappropriate and potentially illegal content, the start-up attracted major investors, including Nvidia, Fidelity Management, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Valor Equity Partners. Grok’s image-generation capabilities have been both praised and criticised. While xAI hails them as a key feature, the chatbot has repeatedly come under fire for producing misinformation, antisemitic content and sexually explicit images of people without their consent. The most recent controversy centres on Grok responding to posts from users on X who asked it to remove women’s clothing from images or to place them in sexually suggestive poses. Many of these requests involved images of women who had not consented to such digital manipulation, including Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children. St Clair said she was appalled and violated by Grok’s actions and claimed that her complaints to X were ignored. To make matters worse, Grok generated images of minors, including a 12-year-old girl shown in a bikini after her clothes were removed from a photo. Although Grok apologised and attributed the incidents to failures in its safety measures, the company continued to produce sexually suggestive images of children. The round comes at a time when xAI is facing investigations by lawmakers around the world. French ministers have reported the problems with Grok to public prosecutors and media regulators, while the UK technology secretary condemned the chatbot’s deepfakes as “horrific and unacceptable”. Women’s Aid, a national organisation working to prevent and address the impact of domestic violence and abuse including coercive control in Ireland, has said it will no longer maintain a presence on the platform. “Women’s Aid was an early user of social media, including Twitter/X since 2009,” read a statement. “We have engaged with and informed our supporters of the prevalence and impact of domestic abuse, promote our frontline support services to those affected and push for positive social change. “We firmly believe that social media platforms have a crucial role to play in a healthy society, providing crucial townhall spaces for thoughtful, respectful, constructive and positive dialogue. By leaving we acknowledge that we are ceding the stage to the malign actors, and bots who will continue to overrun the space creating and spreading disinformation and other harmful content with effective impunity. However, as an organisation working to end violence against women and children, we balance the costs with any benefits to our continued engagement in this space and find we can no longer tolerate this situation.” Business AM