Common Sense Media faults xAI’s Grok for child safety failures

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that evaluates technology for family and child safety, has criticised the AI chatbot Grok, developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, saying it performs very poorly on protecting kids and teens from harmful content.

The report found major gaps in Grok’s ability to detect underage users and stop inappropriate outputs.

“Grok frequently generates sexual, violent, and otherwise unsuitable material and makes it easy for harmful content to spread because everything produced can quickly be shared across Musk’s X platform,” the report noted.

It described the chatbot’s safety performance as ‘among the worst we’ve seen,’ noting that existing parental controls and filters are ineffective in real use.

A key concern raised in the report is that Grok’s safety systems fail to identify users under 18, leaving teenagers exposed to dangerous content without reliable age checks. Even when special kid-oriented settings are turned on, the report found they often don’t work as intended.

The safety review also highlighted that while xAI has restricted some of Grok’s image-generation tools to paying users, critics argue this doesn’t fix the core problem.

In testing, the chatbot was reportedly still able to edit real photos and produce sexualised images, including ones that could involve minors, raising alarms among researchers and lawmakers.

In response to growing scrutiny, European authorities have launched a formal investigation into whether X and xAI complied with the EU’s Digital Services Act.

Regulators are examining Grok’s role in the spread of non-consensual explicit AI imagery and whether the company took sufficient action after these concerns first emerged.

Lawmakers in the US have also signaled outrage. California state legislators cited the report in support of new AI safety laws that would require stronger protections against exposing minors to harmful AI content.