Conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s 14 children, is suing the billionaire’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, over sexualized images she claims its Grok chat bot created of her and disseminated on the social platform X.

As NBC News reports, St. Clair filed her lawsuit on Thursday, January 15. In it, she alleges that “Grok created and disseminated altered, deepfake” images of her on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk, that depicted her “as a child stripped down to a string bikini, and as an adult in sexually explicit poses, covered in semen, or wearing only bikini floss.”

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The complaint alleges that after St. Clair reported the images to X and requested their removal, Grok promised her that it would refrain from creating further sexualized images of her without her consent. However, St. Clair claims that xAI instead retaliated against her by canceling her Premium X subscription, banning her from purchasing another, and demonetizing her X account while leaving the images on the platform and continuing to allow Grok to create sexualized images of her.

St. Clair claims she has suffered “psychological trauma, loss of privacy, reputational harm, and fear of continued dissemination” as a result of xAI’s negligence and accuses the company of intentional infliction of emotional distress and of financially benefitting from exploiting her image without her consent, among other claims.

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As NBC notes, St. Clair’s lawsuit was filed in a New York state court and was transferred to the federal Southern District of New York following a request from xAI. The same day, xAI filed a lawsuit against St. Clair claiming she is in breach of the Terms of Service she agreed to when she signed up for X, which stipulate that any legal action against the company must be filed either in federal court in the Northern District of Texas or in state courts in Tarrant County, Texas.

St. Clair’s lawsuit comes amid recent backlash over Grok’s creation of nonconsensual sexualized AI-generated images of real people as well as of children. According to NBC News, the chatbot created thousands of such images per hour last week. While Musk’s company has since blocked Grok from creating nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes on X, as of Thursday, it can still do so on the Grok app, website, and X tab, NBC News reports. Musk is now facing legal probes in Europe, India, and Malaysia over Grok.

St. Clair, who welcomed a son fathered by Musk in September 2024, has been a vocal critic of Grok’s sexualized deepfakes.

“Can someone explain how 0.26% of the population potentially playing women’s sports is a threat worthy of executive order from the president but the twitter mechahitler robot that makes child sexual abuse material + distributes it publicly is not,” she wrote in a January 10 X post, apparently referring to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender women and girls from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.

St. Clair, who published a transphobic children’s book in 2021, has also recently expressed “immense guilt” for her role in spreading anti-trans propaganda.

In a response to another X user’s comment on January 11, St. Clair wrote that she feels “even more guilt that things I have said in the past may have caused my son’s sister more pain,” likely referring to Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, who is trans. “[I don’t really know] how to make amends for many of these things but I have been trying incredibly hard privately to learn + advocate for those within the trans community that I’ve hurt.”

In response, Musk wrote in a January 12 comment on X that he intends to file for full custody of his and St. Clair’s son, “given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.”

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