A Dutch Court Just Told Grok to Stop Making Non-Consensual Nudes or Pay 100K a Day

On March 26, an Amsterdam district court issued a preliminary injunction against xAI and its chatbot Grok, ordering the company to stop generating and distributing non-consensual sexual imagery and child sexual abuse material in the Netherlands. The penalty for non-compliance is 100,000 euros per day per defendant, capped at 10 million euros.

This is the first European court ruling to impose a binding injunction on an AI image generator over this type of content.

The case was brought by Offlimits, a Dutch nonprofit that fights online sexual abuse, and Fonds Slachtofferhulp, a victim support organization. Their reasoning was straightforward: regulatory enforcement was moving too slowly relative to the pace of harm. After Grok launched its image editing feature in late December 2025, reports to Offlimits surged. They sent a formal notice to xAI on February 4 demanding the functionality be removed. When nothing changed, they went to court.

xAI lawyers argued at a March 12 hearing that the company had implemented stringent safeguards as of January 20, 2026, and categorically denied that Grok still permitted non-consensual intimate imagery or CSAM. The court found that claim difficult to reconcile with evidence.

On March 9 - the exact same day xAI sent that categorical denial to Offlimits - Offlimits demonstrated that Grok was still capable of generating a sexualized video of a real person from a single uploaded photograph, without any consent verification. The judge noted that this timing “raises reasonable doubt regarding the certainty with which the defendants stated that the measures taken are adequate.”

The court also flagged a structural inconsistency in xAI position: the company simultaneously argued that generating such material was now impossible and that a 100% guarantee was technically unachievable. You can have it both ways in marketing, not in court.

On the legal basis, the court held that non-consensual undressing images constitute a violation of the GDPR, and that facilitating CSAM constitutes unlawful conduct under Dutch civil code. The court explicitly rejected xAI argument that liability lay with the users issuing the prompts rather than the platform. As the designer and operator of the image generation model, xAI is the designated party responsible for preventing unlawful outputs - regardless of who types the prompt.

This builds on the ECJ Russmedia ruling from December 2025, which established that online platform operators are joint controllers under GDPR for user-generated content involving sensitive personal data. But the Grok case goes further: Russmedia involved a platform that passively hosted harmful content. Grok generates it.

The ruling landed the same day the European Parliament voted to ban AI “nudifier” systems across the EU. The Parliament approved a prohibition on AI tools that create or manipulate sexually explicit images resembling an identifiable real person without their consent. National investigations into xAI are already running in France, Germany, and the UK. Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok entirely.

In the US, Baltimore became the first major American city to sue xAI on March 24, two days before the Dutch ruling. Three teenagers in Tennessee filed their own lawsuit last week after Grok created sexually explicit content using their images. The European Commission opened a formal investigation into xAI under the Digital Services Act in January.

xAI was ordered to pay 2.2 million euros in legal costs to Offlimits within 14 days. The company has not publicly commented on the ruling.