Billionaire Elon Musk has been summoned for a voluntary interview in Paris on Monday as part of a French probe into his social media platform X, though it remains unclear if he will appear.<\/p>\n
French authorities issued a summons for Musk 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 an investigation into X’s AI chatbot Grok’s dissemination of Holocaust denials and sexual deepfakes.<\/p>\n
In early February, French prosecutors 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
In February, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said X employees had also been summoned to appear between April 20 and 24 “to be heard as witnesses”.<\/p>\n
But whether or not those invited for voluntary questioning appear would not be “an obstacle to the continuation of the investigation,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said on 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
-‘Serious concerns’-<\/p>\n
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” regarding whether the companies complied with personal data laws when it came to Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfakes.<\/p>\n
In late 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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