Ashley St Clair, American writer and mother of Elon Musk’s son Romulus has sued the tech billionaire’s AI company xAI. In the lawsuit filed with the supreme court of the state of New York, Clair alleges that her explicit images were generated by AI chatbot Grok, including one in which she was underage. She further claims that the AI tool, integrated into X (formerly Twitter) – also owned by Elon Musk – promised to stop generating explicit images but continued to do so. Clair is seeking both punitive and compensatory damages from the company. The lawsuit comes days after the tech billionaire said that he will seek full custody of his one-year-old son with Clair. Responding to a user urging him for full custody, Musk wrote on X “I will be filing for full custody today, given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.”

What the lawsuit filed by Ashley St Clair claims

The lawsuit states that the social media company “retaliated against her, demonetising her X account and generating multitudes more images of her, including unlawful images of her in sex positions, covered in semen, virtually nude, and images of her as a child naked”.The filing further alleges that not only were the generated images nonconsensual, but “Grok and xAI also had explicit knowledge that St Clair was not consenting to the creation or dissemination of these images because of her requests for removal”.

xAI and Grok are ‘public nuisance’

Ashley St Clair is being represented by Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights lawyer. In a statement to the Guardian, Goldberg said:“xAI is not a reasonably safe product and is a public nuisance. Nobody has born the brunt more than Ashley St Clair. Ashley filed suit because Grok was harassing her by creating and distributing nonconsensual, abusive, and degrading images of her and publishing them on X.“This harm flowed directly from deliberate design choices that enabled Grok to be used as a tool of harassment and humiliation. Companies should not be able to escape responsibility when the products they build predictably cause this kind of harm. We intend to hold Grok accountable and to help establish clear legal boundaries for the entire public’s benefit to prevent AI from being weaponised for abuse.”