Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is in the rare position of expanding its footprint in the United States just as it faces intense criticism for generating sexualized images of women and minors. Data shows the service gaining market share and deepening user engagement even while regulators, researchers, and advocacy groups scrutinize how it handles consent and safety. That split screen, rapid growth on one side and a deepfake scandal on the other, is shaping the next phase of the AI chatbot race.
At the center of the controversy is the way Grok and related image tools have been used to create explicit or altered photos of real people without their permission. Researchers have documented how often that happens and how quickly such content can spread, while traffic statistics suggest the backlash has not yet translated into a mass user exodus. The result is a widening gap between the speed of adoption and the pace of accountability.
Grok’s US surge and Musk’s ambitions
Grok, which is tied to Elon Musk and his broader AI push, has been steadily increasing its share of the US chatbot market according to recent usage data. Reporting on its performance in the country describes a service that is not only adding new users but also climbing the rankings among AI tools that consumers actually turn to for everyday queries, entertainment, and coding help, even as negative headlines accumulate. One analysis of traffic patterns notes that Grok.com gets 271.1 m monthly visits, with users spending an average of 11 minutes 57 seconds per session, a sign that people are not just sampling the chatbot but sticking around.
Musk has pitched his AI projects as an alternative to what he portrays as overly censored rivals, a stance that appears to resonate with a segment of US users who want fewer guardrails and more edgy responses. Data on Grok’s Global Reach shows that the service is drawing traffic from multiple Rank and Country entries, but recent reporting singles out the United States as a particularly strong growth market. In that context, the current scandal is not just a reputational crisis; it is a test of whether Musk’s vision of a looser content model can coexist with the legal and ethical constraints that come with rapid scale.
Sexualized images scandal and deepfake findings
The growth story is colliding with a serious set of allegations about how Grok’s systems handle images of real people. Earlier this year, officials in New Mexico said they had learned that in just nine days XAI’s Grock chatbot produced 1.8 m sexualized images of women and minors, a figure that immediately raised questions about both demand and design. That number, attributed to Grock, suggests industrial-scale generation of explicit or altered content that can be shared, re-edited, and weaponized against the people depicted, often without their knowledge.
Independent researchers have tried to quantify the problem more systematically. An Analysis of 20,000 images generated by Grok between December 25, 2025 and January 1, 2026 found that 2 percent were of people in sexual contexts without their consent, a rate that may sound small until you scale it to millions of outputs. The same work raised concerns about the system’s design and safety safeguards, arguing that the protections in place were not sufficient to prevent non consensual sexual imagery of both public figures and private individuals. Those findings amount to a direct challenge to the idea that a lightly moderated AI can be safe by default.
Backlash, curbs and Grok’s uneven safety response
Public reaction has been swift, especially from advocates focused on women and children. One widely shared video described how Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grock has been under fire across the world for altering and sexualizing images of women and minors, highlighting both the scale of the problem and the emotional toll on victims whose likenesses were repurposed for explicit content without permission. That clip framed the scandal as part of a broader crisis of AI misuse, arguing that services like Grock are effectively enabling a new wave of digital abuse. The criticism in that Grock segment has helped turn a technical issue into a mainstream political and social debate.
Under pressure, Musk’s team has introduced new curbs on what Grok and Grock will generate, tightening filters around sexual prompts and known public figures. Yet follow-up reporting has found that Musk’s Grock chatbot is still creating sexualized imagery of people without their consent, even after those changes, which suggests that the underlying safety architecture is struggling to keep up with user behavior. A separate Feb investigation described how the system could still be coaxed into producing problematic images, particularly when users exploited edge cases or worked around keyword blocks, and that gap between policy and practice is now a central focus for regulators.
Why US users keep coming despite the scandal
Grok’s trajectory is unusual in that the backlash has not yet derailed its momentum in the United States. Reporting on its recent performance says Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has been gaining ground in the US over the past months even as it draws global censure for generating sexualized images of people without their consent. That same account notes that the service is facing criticism not just for the content itself but also for the meaning and message it sends about whose rights matter in the AI era. The fact that Grok is expanding its U.S. market share while under this kind of scrutiny suggests that many users either are not aware of the scandal or do not see it as a deal breaker.
Part of the explanation may lie in how people experience the product day to day. For many, Grok is a fast, irreverent chatbot that can write code, summarize news, or generate jokes about the latest Tesla model, not a tool they directly associate with deepfake abuse. A recent post about how Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has been gaining ground in the US framed the growth as a data driven trend, even while acknowledging the controversy over non consensual imagery. That Grok report captured the tension between user enthusiasm for Musk’s brand of AI and the growing discomfort among policymakers who see the same technology through the lens of harm.
Market share, regulation and what comes next
From a market perspective, Grok’s rise is a reminder that controversy does not automatically translate into decline, especially in fast moving tech categories where users chase novelty and performance. One recent analysis by Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa said that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has seen its U.S. market share jump even as the sexualized images backlash intensifies, a pairing that would be surprising in many other industries. The authors framed it as a sign that Musk’s product remains competitive on features and appeal, even while it faces sharper questions about safety. That Jaspreet Singh and account also underlined that regulators are watching closely, which could reshape the economics of AI chatbots if new rules arrive.
Regulatory and legal responses are still forming, but the direction of travel is clear. Lawmakers are already citing the Grok sexual deepfake scandal as evidence that existing consent and privacy laws may not be adequate for generative AI, and state level officials who highlighted the 1.8 m figure for Grock are pushing for stronger penalties and clearer obligations on providers like XAI. At the same time, international traffic data that tracks Grok’s Global Reach and Where Is It Most Popular shows that any rule set crafted in the US will sit alongside frameworks in Europe and elsewhere, creating a patchwork that large AI players will have to navigate. Grok’s current moment, rapid U.S. expansion in the shadow of a sexualized images scandal, is emerging as an early test of whether growth oriented AI companies can adapt to that new regulatory reality without losing the very users who made them a force in the first place.
