Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Fee says ban comes after failure to adjust to formal notices.
Revealed On 12 Jan 2026
Malaysia has blocked entry to Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence mannequin Grok amid a world uproar over the chatbot’s capacity to create sexuality express photos of individuals with out their consent.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Fee (MCMC) mentioned it had briefly banned Grok after ordering the chatbot’s developer xAI and the social media platform X to introduce safeguards to make sure compliance with the regulation.
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In response to regulatory notices issued final week, X “targeted totally on the user-initiated reporting mechanisms and did not handle the inherent dangers that come up from the design and operation of the AI instrument,” the MCMC mentioned in a press release on Sunday.
“MCMC considers this inadequate to stop hurt or guarantee authorized compliance.”
The Malaysian watchdog’s announcement got here a day after Indonesia grew to become the world’s first nation to formally ban the chatbot, which is obtainable as each a standalone platform and an in-built function on X.
Grok has been mired in controversy in latest days over the usage of its image-generation instrument to depict actual individuals in minimal clothes and sexualised poses with out their consent.
The unfold of the sexualised deepfakes, a few of them together with minors, has prompted condemnation and calls to motion from officers in quite a few international locations, together with the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia.
xAI initially responded to a request for remark from Al Jazeera with an automatic response saying: “Legacy Media Lies.”
A spokesperson later directed Al Jazeera to an earlier assertion by X, which mentioned the platform takes motion in opposition to unlawful content material, together with baby sexual abuse materials.
“Anybody utilizing or prompting Grok to make unlawful content material will undergo the identical penalties as in the event that they add unlawful content material,” the assertion mentioned.
Grok final week started limiting the usage of its image-generation instrument on X to paid subscribers in an obvious bid to quell the controversy.
European officers and campaigners reacted negatively to the transfer, saying it did little to resolve the core drawback of facilitating non-consensual imagery.
