Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Happy new year! I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Today in tech, we are examining the output of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, and the US’s ban on foreign drones.
Inside Grok’s ‘lapses in safeguards’
Late last week, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot unleashed a flood of images of women, nude and in very little clothing, both real and imagined, in response to users’ public requests on X, formerly Twitter. Mixed in with the generated images of adults were ones of young girls – children – likewise wearing “minimal clothing”, according to Grok itself.
In an unprecedented move, the chatbot itself apologized while its maker, xAI, remained silent: “As noted, we’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them – CSAM [child sexual abuse material] is illegal and prohibited,” Grok said in a post on X.
It took X another three days to confirm in a statement that it had proactively removed child sexual abuse material.
In Europe, Grok’s deluge of sexualized images elicited strong condemnation. Child welfare and abuse often serve as third-rail issues in technology, spurring stronger backlash than other problems and forming the basis for regulation. French ministers referred the images to local prosecutors, calling the bot’s “sexual and sexist” output “manifestly illegal”. In the UK, women’s rights campaigners and some politicians saw in the debacle evidence that the UK government has been “dragging its heels” in enacting legislation that made the creation of such intimate images illegal.
In the US, where xAI has a $200m contract with the military, lawmakers largely remained silent.
Musk had reposted a picture of his own body in a bikini as the trend picked up steam, along with laughing emojis. As controversy grew, however, he did not address it, instead tweeting about Grok’s ability to replicate old Hollywood movies and create cat videos.
There was one person with a particular connection to Musk who did express outrage over the flood of sexualized images: Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of the billionaire’s sons, though the two have become estranged. In an interview with the Guardian, she outlined the real-world impact of Grok’s images.
Musk’s supporters had used Grok to attack her, she said, even undressing a picture of her as a child. It was a form of revenge porn, she said.
“I felt horrified, I felt violated, especially seeing my toddler’s backpack in the back of it,” St Clair said of another image in which she has been put into a bikini, turned around and bent over.
Her complaints to X staff went nowhere, she said.
The US takes the TikTok approach to drones
Two days before Christmas, the US banned the sale of new versions of foreign-made drones. The old ones can still be used and sold, but no new products will be allowed.
The order comes from the US Federal Communications Commission, led by Donald Trump’s attack dog against the media, Brendan Carr. The FCC said in a statement that the White House had convened “an executive branch inter-agency body with appropriate national security expertise” to conduct a review of the threat posed by foreign-made unmanned aerial systems, the government name for drones.
The group came to the conclusion that unmanned aerial systems and component parts produced anywhere but domestically pose “unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of US persons” and should be included on the FCC’s “covered list”. Membership on the list precludes the sale or even marketing of the offending equipment in the US.
The FCC statement continues: “In their determination, national security agencies referenced, among other things, concerns that that foreign-made UAS could be used for attacks and disruptions, unauthorized surveillance, sensitive data exfiltration, and other UAS threats to the homeland.” The emphasis here is mine.
The FCC has not published any materials demonstrating to the public that foreign-made drones have in fact been used in the malicious ways described above. The potential is there, but not the act.
Perhaps the FCC appears is less concerned with national security so much as economic protectionism. The agency’s factsheet reads: “Additionally, the determination noted that reliance on such devices unacceptably undermines the US drone industrial base.” Again, emphasis mine. The focus on the industrial base echoes Trump’s predictions that semiconductor chips and even entire iPhones will be made in the US. Experts say his dream of repatriating manufacturing is far off.
The largest drone manufacturer in the world, DJI, said in response: “Concerns about DJI’s data security have not been grounded in evidence and instead reflect protectionism, contrary to the principles of an open market.” The company is based in Shenzhen in China and is ergo affected by the order.
If this sounds familiar, TikTok was subject to a similar order, forced to sell to a US owner or face a total prohibition on the grounds of a potential national security threat. The company challenged the ban-or-divest burden all the way to the supreme court.
The fight did not reveal the evidence that underpinned the government’s fears. Throughout the legal fight, US government lawyers demanded to keep the rationale for Congress’s national security fears hidden from the public and even concealed from TikTok’s own defense counsel. The supreme court ultimately arrived at its decision upholding the ban-or-divest bill without considering classified material.
The US reached a deal in December for TikTok to partially be sold to business software giant Oracle.
DJI has not said whether it will challenge the FCC’s ban in court.
The wider TechScape
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Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice
Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and gen Z
