Keir Starmer has insisted the government will ‘take action’ on the sexualised images of children circulating on social media platform X – as he urges Elon Musk to ‘get a grip’.
The Prime Minister said this afternoon he had asked for ‘all options to be on the table’ amid the ‘disgraceful’ wave of illegal images being created by the app’s AI tool Grok.
His comments come despite a survivor of child sexual abuse earlier this week calling the government’s response ‘spineless’.
Speaking to Greatest Hits Radio, Sir Keir said: ‘It’s disgraceful, it’s disgusting and it’s not to be tolerated.
‘X has got to get a grip of this and Ofcom have our full support to take action in relation to this. This is wrong; it’s unlawful – we’re not going to tolerate it.’
He added X needed to ‘get their act together’ and ‘get the material down’.
‘We will take action on this because it’s simply not tolerable,’ Sir Keir concluded.
EXCLUSIVE: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tells us he “will take action” on “disgraceful and disgusting” reports around child abuse imagery on Elon Musk’s Grok AI.
It’s as the Internet Watch Foundation says criminal imagery appears to have been created using Grok: pic.twitter.com/KwQFbyZyIq
— Greatest Hits Radio News (@GHRNewsUK) January 8, 2026 
Ofcom ‘urgently contacted’ X and xAI over the sexualised images of children, which Grok admitted to in a post on the social media platform
It follows a wave of politicians – and celebrities – also condemning the readily available illegal material.
Former transport minister Louise Haigh said the Government and Labour party ought to ‘remove themselves entirely’ from social media site X.
She added the ‘enablement, if not encouragement, of child sexual abuse mean it is unconscionable to use the site for another minute’, and urged ministers to join her in leaving it.
Users of X appear to have prompted its artificial intelligence Grok, which is integrated into the platform, to generate deepfake images of children ‘in minimal clothing’.
Ms Haigh said: ‘It was already an unpleasant place prior to its takeover by Elon Musk but since his acceptance of hate speech and anonymous online abusers, it has become utterly unusable.
‘I continued to maintain an account and occasionally post because a critical mass of people, including the Government and journalists who we need to communicate with as MPs, remained on the site.’
Regulator Ofcom said it made ‘urgent contact’ with Musk’s social media platform.
It followed an internet safety organisation saying its analysts had confirmed the existence of ‘criminal imagery of children aged between 11 and 13 which appears to have been created using the (Grok) tool’.
Regulator Ofcom said it made ‘urgent contact’ with Musk’s (pictured) social media platform
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said the material was being shared in a dark web forum by users ‘boasting how they had used Grok, and how easy it had been’.
Earlier this week, Jessaline Caine, a survivor of child sexual abuse, branded the government’s repsonse ‘spineless’.
She told the Guardian that the chatbot was still obeying requests to manipulate an image of her as a three-year-old to dress her in a string bikini.
Identical image requests made by Ms Caine to ChatGPT and Gemini were rejected.
Crossbench peer and online child safety campaigner Beeban Kidron urged the government to ‘show some backbone’ and said the Online Safety Act regime should be ‘reassessed so it is swifter and has more teeth’.
Referring to X, she added: ‘If any other consumer product this level of harm, it would already have been recalled.’
In August, Elon Musk‘s X warned that the newly-introduced Online Safety Act, which requires users to prove their age, was ‘putting free speech at risk’.
The act forces platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X, along with sites hosting pornography, to implement strict age verification measures to prove users are over 18.
Former transport minister Louise Haigh (pictured) said the Government and Labour party ought to ‘remove themselves entirely’ from social media site X
Critics have suggested the verification process has blocked off parts of the internet that should not fall into the same vein – including videos of political protests at asylum seeker hotels.
Restricted videos can no longer be watched on platforms like X without a user surrendering personal information in order to prove their age, such as credit card information, a personal ID, or even a facial scan – which users are already circumventing.
In the summer, users complained they were unable to view clips on X of police detaining activists in the UK, with messages on-screen saying it was ‘due to local laws’ until the site could estimate a user’s age.
A petition against the act neared half a million signatures.
Alex Baynham, who started the Parliamentary petition said the scope of the Act was ‘far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society’.
He said: ‘We think that Parliament should repeal the act and work towards producing proportionate legislation rather than risking clamping down on civil society talking about trains, football, video games or even hamsters because it can’t deal with individual bad faith actors.’
Prominent celebrities to have spoken out against X’s AI tool include Love Island presenter Maya Jama, who publicly asked Grok not to modify or edit her photos.
Jama, who has nearly 700,000 followers on X, posted said: ‘Hey @grok, I do not authorize you to take, modify, or edit any photo of mine, whether those published in the past or the upcoming ones I post.
Maya Jama has officially taken on Elon Musk’s platform X over AI images as she ordered Grok not to edit her pictures after her mother received fake nudes created from her bikini snaps
Now the Love Island presenter has joined X users in calling out the cases system being used to make sexualised images of real people
‘If a third party asks you to make any edit to a photo of mine of any kind, please deny that request.’
In a separate post, the TV presenter added that she hopes people have a sense to know when something is real or created by AI after deepfakes were made of her a few years ago.
She said: ‘Before ‘grok’ someone photoshopped bikini photos I had on my Instagram to nudes and they went around, I only found out because my own mum sent them to me worried.
‘The internet is scary and only getting worse smh (shaking my head).’
A reply from Grok said it respects her wishes and will not use, modify or edit any of the star’s photos.
It said: ‘As an AI, I don’t generate or alter images myself – my responses are text-based.
‘If anyone asks me to do so with your content, I’ll decline. Thanks for letting me know.’