Paris (France) (AFP) – Elon Musk did not appear Monday for a voluntary interview with Paris prosecutors, who had summoned the American tech billionaire over a probe into his social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok. Prosecutors told AFP they had “taken note of the absence of the first people summoned,” without mentioning Musk’s name. The billionaire had dubbed the French authorities “retards” weeks earlier in a French-language X post. “The presence or absence (of the people summoned) is not an obstacle to continuing the investigation,” prosecutors added.
They had issued the summons in February as part of an investigation, launched in January 2025, into allegations that X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. The probe was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes by X’s AI chatbot Grok. French prosecutors in February also searched the Paris offices of X, in what the social media giant — which has denied any wrongdoing — slammed as “politicized” raids and an “abusive judicial act”. At the time, Paris prosecutors also summoned Musk and then-CEO Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews as the “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” a move Musk called a “political attack.” Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.
In February, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said employees of the company had also been summoned to appear between April 20 and 24 “to be heard as witnesses”. But whether they turn up for voluntary questioning would not be “an obstacle to the continuation of the investigation,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said Saturday. Officials have not offered any details on the location or time of Musk’s scheduled interview. The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offences, including complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity. The social media company in July called the probe “politically motivated”. Its complaints were echoed Monday by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, himself the subject of a French probe into illegal activity on his platform. President Emmanuel Macron’s “France is losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy,” read a post on X by Russian-born Durov, who also holds French nationality.
The French investigation comes as part of a broader international backlash against Grok after it emerged that users could sexualise images of women and children using simple text prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”. It generated an estimated three million sexualised images — mostly of women, though also 23,000 that appeared to depict children — in 11 days, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog, said in late January. In a separate investigation, Britain’s data regulator in February launched investigations into Musk’s X and xAI over “serious concerns” over whether the companies complied with personal data laws when it came to Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfakes. In January, the European Union also hit X with a probe over Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfake images of women and minors.
© 2024 AFP
