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 chatbok Grok.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors told AFP they had “taken note of the absence of the first people summoned,” without mentioning Musk’s name.<\/p>\n
The billionaire had dubbed the French authorities “retards” weeks earlier in a French-language X post.<\/p>\n
“The presence or absence (of the people summoned) is not an obstacle to continuing the investigation,” prosecutors added.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The probe was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes by X’s AI chatbot Grok.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.<\/p>\n
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– ‘Politically motivated’ –<\/p>\n
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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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Officials have not offered any details on the location or time of Musk’s scheduled interview.<\/p>\n
The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offences, including complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
The social media company in July called the probe “politically motivated”.<\/p>\n
Its complaints were echoed Monday by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, himself the subject of a French probe into illegal activity on his platform.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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– UK, EU probes –<\/p>\n
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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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In January, the European Union also hit X with a probe over Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfake images of women and minors.<\/p>\n
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