January 12, 2026 | 04:48 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The two Southeast Asian countries became the first in the world to ban access to Elon Musk's Grok over the weekend after the AI chatbot was used to produce sexually explicit and non-consensual images.
Indonesian regulators temporarily blocked the bot on Saturday, with Malaysia following suit on Sunday.
Grok, which can be accessed through X, formerly Twitter, sparked global outrage after it was used to generate images of female users in sexually explicit positions and in bikinis.
Some images also involved children.
What did Indonesia and Malaysia say about the Grok ban?
"The government sees non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity and the safety of citizens in the digital space," Indonesia's Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement Saturday.
The Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) issued a statement on Sunday saying it was blocking access to Grok after it was repeatedly used "to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive, and non-consensual manipulated images, including content involving women and minors."
The MCMC said it had contacted Musk's X and xAI — the AI company behind Grok — demanding effective safeguards.
According to MCMC, the responses failed to address the risk posed by the AI tools, instead referring to user-initiated reporting mechanisms.
"MCMC considers this insufficient to prevent harm or ensure legal compliance," it said.
It added that the AI bot would remain blocked until effective safeguards were implemented.
What is Elon Musk's Grok chatbot?
Grok is just one of the contestants in the AI race that includes offerings from Google and Microsoft, among others.
AI tools have repeatedly sparked questions over a lack of regulations, with regulators struggling to keep up with the abilities of the new technology in some cases, and in other cases being explicitly told to limit regulation, as in the US under the Trump administration.
Musk, who has been a close ally of President Trump, launched Grok in 2023 with free access given to users on X.
In summer 2025, the company then launched Grok Imagine, an image generation feature, with a so-called "spicy mode" that permitted the creation of adult content.
Complaints over Grok's image generation have come from the EU, the UK, India and France. In reponse, the image generation feature was limited to paying X users only, but critics say this did little to resolve the issue.
Read: Indonesia Temporarily Blocks X's Grok AI Feature
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