PARIS — French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.
The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It’s looking into alleged “complicity” in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.
Prosecutors also asked Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino to attend “voluntary interviews” on April 20. Employees of X have also been summoned that same week to be heard as witnesses, the statement said. Yaccarino was CEO from May 2023 until July 2025.
A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.
In a message posted on X, the Paris prosecutors’ office announced the ongoing searches and said it was leaving the platform while calling on followers to join on other social media.
“At this stage, the conduct of the investigation is based on a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French law, as it operates on the national territory,” the prosecutors’ statement said.
European Union police agency Europol ’’is supporting the French authorities in this,″ Europol spokesperson Jan Op Gen Oorth told The Associated Press, without elaborating.
The investigation was first opened following reports by a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X were likely to have distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system.
It was later expanded after Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust and spread sexually explicit deepfakes, the statement said. Holocaust denial is a crime in France.
Grok wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” rather than for mass murder – language long associated with Holocaust denial.
Musk’s artificial intelligence company built xAI and it is integrated into his X platform.
In later posts on its X account, the chatbot acknowledged that its earlier reply was wrong, said it had been deleted and pointed to historical evidence that Zyklon B in Auschwitz gas chambers was used to kill more than 1 million people.
Grok has a history of making antisemitic comments. Musk’s company took down posts from the chatbot that appeared to praise Adolf Hitler after complaints.
X is also under pressure from the EU. The 27-nation bloc’s executive arm opened an investigation last month after Grok spewed nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images on the platform.
Brussels has already hit X with a 120-million euro (then-$140 million) fine for shortcomings under the bloc’s sweeping digital regulations, including blue checkmarks that broke the rules on “deceptive design practices” that risked exposing users to scams and manipulation.
