A Wyoming woman has joined a federal class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk's xAI company after discovering that her stepfather allegedly used the Grok chatbot to create thousands of AI-generated child sexual abuse images from her childhood photographs.

The woman, identified in court documents as Jane Doe 4, learned of the alleged abuse earlier this year when she arrived at her parents' home in Wyoming to set up a family party and found the street filled with state and local law enforcement vehicles. Her stepfather had allegedly transformed innocent childhood photographs into explicit material that he shared online.

Jane Doe 4 has now joined a lawsuit originally filed in March 2026 by three Tennessee teenagers, two of whom are still minors, who allege similar abuse through xAI's Grok platform.

Mark Chalos, the Nashville managing partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein who represents the plaintiffs, explained the scope of the problem. "It's certainly difficult to know that pictures of family vacations and pictures of hanging out with your friend have been taken, turned into something pornographic and used for bad purposes," he said.

The lawsuit accuses xAI and Stability AI of failing to implement adequate safeguards to prevent their artificial intelligence tools from being used to create child sexual abuse material. The complaint specifically points to what it describes as xAI's "Spicy Mode," which allegedly promoted more explicit AI image generation while failing to implement comparable protections against child sexual abuse material.

"This is something Elon Musk has called Spicy Mode," Chalos said. "They put it behind a paywall, which is essentially these AI companies are profiting from providing the tools to allow people to make child pornography."

The lawsuit also cites research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which analyzed a sample of 200,000 AI-generated images from approximately 4.6 million images Grok created during an 11-day period. Based on that sample, researchers estimated that about 23,000 sexualized images appeared to depict children.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children confirmed that generative AI has rapidly emerged as a growing tool for creating child sexual abuse material. "Last year alone, we've received over 400,000 reports through our CyberTipline for this type of material," said Shelley Allwang, director of NCMEC's Child Victim Identification Program.

A spokesperson for Stability AI responded that the company is "committed to preventing the misuse of AI technology, particularly in the creation and dissemination of harmful content, including CSAM," which it says is prohibited under its Acceptable Use Policy. The company said it has implemented "robust safeguards" since taking over development of the Stable Diffusion family of models in late 2022 and regularly works with U.S. and international law enforcement.

The lawsuit seeks at least $150,000 per victim for each alleged violation, along with additional damages and changes to how AI companies design and safeguard their products. Court records show the person accused of creating the images was arrested.

Stacy