How Apple “privately threatened” to remove Elon Musk's Grok app from App Store to deal with Deepfakes menace

Apple reportedly threatened Elon Musk owned X (formerly Twitter) and xAI to remove the Grok app from the App Store earlier this year. The iPhone-maker, according to a NBC News report, sent a letter to US senators about how it worked behind the scenes to address the then viral incidents of sexualized deepfakes generated by Grok. For those unaware, Elon Musk’s Grok and X faced backlash after the AI chatbot Grok generated sexualised images, especially of children and women without consent. Apple then came under pressure to pull the Grok and X apps from the App Store. While the company remained silent then, NBC News says the company “found X and Grok in violation of its guidelines,” and “privately threatened to remove” Grok from the App Store.

As per the report, Apple “contacted the teams behind both X and Grok after it received complaints and saw news coverage of the scandal,” requiring “the app developers to create a plan to improve content moderation.”

The report says that X submitted an update of the Grok app for review, but it got rejected as the “changes didn’t go far enough.”

What Apple said in its letter to Elon Musk’s X and xAI

As quoted in NBC News report, Apple stated in the letter:

“Apple reviewed the next submissions made by the developers and determined that X had substantially resolved its violations, but the Grok app remained out of compliance. As a result, we rejected the Grok submission and notified the developer that additional changes to remedy the violation would be required, or the app could be removed from the App Store. […] Following further engagement and changes by the Grok developer, we determined that Grok had substantially improved and therefore approved its latest submission.”



In another report, NBC News said Grok “continues to generate sexualized images of people without their consent,” after documenting dozens of such cases over the past month. It further states that the volume of images has decreased significantly from January this year.