UK Politician Jess Asato Got Deepfaked. Now She’s Taking xAI to Court

Disturbing and degrading deepfake images of the MP circulated widely. One appeared to depict a sexual assault. When Asato reported them to X, the platform repeatedly dismissed her complaints. So she decided to take the fight somewhere else: the courts. She is now pursuing legal action against Musk’s xAI, arguing that it unlawfully used her image without her consent. The case could help establish a precedent for holding AI companies accountable when their products cause harm. For Asato, this is personal, but it is hardly new territory. Before entering Parliament, she spent years working with charities supporting survivors of domestic abuse and vulnerable children. That experience has shaped her political career, informing her push for stronger protections for women and children online. Now, she is confronting more troubling questions: What happens when the technology enabling abuse becomes ubiquitous, the platforms hosting it refuse to intervene, and the people targeted are left to fight back on their own? At stake for Asato is more than the misuse of a single image. It is whether consent still means anything when AI can manufacture almost anything, and whether the companies building these tools can be made to answer for what they do. Asato is betting that the law can catch up with the technology. And she is prepared to take on Musk to find out. (xAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.) Also, before you read on, be aware that this interview includes references to sexual assault and child sex abuse. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ROSIE SWASH: Jess, I just want to have a couple of warm-up questions before we get into it. Tell us a bit about your background, how did you end up becoming MP for Lowestoft? JESS ASATO: Sure. So, I grew up in East Anglia in Norfolk and Suffolk, and in a not very political family. I got the politics bug in 1997 when Tony Blair was talking about education, education, education. Having experienced it, I felt that we could be doing a lot better in our education system. So I joined the Labour Party and got involved with my local groups. Before Parliament, I worked for the largest children's charity in the UK for three years on their policy and public affairs, trying to change legislation on behalf of the most vulnerable children in the country. Six years prior to that I worked for a domestic abuse charity called SafeLives where we did huge amounts of work to try and improve the situation for survivors of domestic abuse, particularly through the Domestic Abuse Act. Those twin issues of women and children have become my focus in Parliament, and I’ve been very clear that my reason for being here, my mission really, is to be a voice for women and children. Well, that’s a good entry point for us to start talking about this year. So in early 2026, there was widespread reporting on Grok, xAI’s chatbot, being used to create sexualized images of children and women, and those images being circulated on X. How aware were you at this point of the phenomenon of deepfakes being used in this way? Very aware, and actually had been working with survivors who had experienced deepfakes for quite a number of years. Ever since the advent of AI this has been happening to women, and there’s also been developing risks of children both being put into child sexual abuse material and also children using nudification tools on other children, thereby criminalizing themselves because these tools are so easy to access and often free. So I was already very alive to the huge harms being created by AI deepfakes of both women and children before Grok ever happened. It was a known harm, which is why many of the tools from other companies had already taken steps to stop them from being used to create this kind of content. There are a number of tools where, if you type in “nudify,” or “take the clothes off this person,” the tool will refuse to do that. So into that environment came Grok. Was there a particularly egregious example or incident prior to Grok when you became aware of deepfakes that really stuck with you? There is a brilliant campaigner who goes by the name of Jodie. I think it was probably listening to the experiences of Jodie, who was deepfaked, and it was such an affront to her that somebody would do this, and then she found out it was actually a friend. Such a betrayal of trust. These things destroy not just the individual involved, but often families and everyone around them too. For people who don’t know, who exactly was Jodie? Is this a constituent of yours or someone who came forward to you specifically? No, no, no. She's a very well-known campaigner on this issue. That’s not her real name. I know it sounds obvious, but what exactly is nudification? It is where you ask an AI tool to take the image or video of a real person and use generative AI to make that person either nude, partially nude, or engaging in pornographic acts. This is something that, because of the photorealistic nature of AI images, it has become increasingly hard to see what is a fake image. It can often look incredibly, incredibly real. So what was it particularly about the Grok scandal earlier this year that made you want to raise this in the House of Commons? It was the fact that we already knew that you could stop this from happening by designing the AI tool to reject the ability to do this. This was completely avoidable. That’s why I spoke out, but also because I’d just spent a year and a half campaigning to get a ban on nudification apps, and here was an all-purpose AI tool becoming a nudification app. It just felt to me as though we were making strides in the UK, and then the world’s richest man and his product decided to turn the clock back. So what exactly did you stand up and say? What I did was I talked about the need for the government to accelerate its ban on nudification apps, which it did. So the then secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Liz Kendall, said that she was going to bring that ban into law through the Crime and Policing Act, which she did. But I also said that it was very important that we went further than that, because, of course, Grok itself is not a sole-purpose nudification tool. It has a general use, and therefore we needed to bring all AI chatbots under the auspices of the Online Safety Act. That is also what eventually happened in the Crime and Policing Act, and we’re now waiting until that legislation comes into effect. There’s got to be a consultation, I understand, before it does. So technically another Grok could happen in this period, but in the future there would be much stronger measures that we could take against tools like Grok creating nudification content. So that’s a really positive outcome of your interjection in Parliament, but what else happened as a result of you standing up? Well, one of the things that happened was that I posted on social media saying that Elon Musk should stop Grok from being able to do this. And then, of course, I became a victim of the same trend. So Grok put this woman in a bikini. And most of the images were sort of pornified, I would say. They weren’t nude images, but they were me with inflated boobs in a bikini. Then people tried to make it funny, I guess, by putting a swastika on me or hammer and sickles. Or making me pregnant with quintuplets and putting me in a kitchen. Because of course that’s the only use for women—birthing and making dinner. But the really disturbing one was a video of me being surrounded by a group of men, chloroformed over my mouth, and then I fall backwards onto a chair. Then my skirts are lifted up. So no nudity, but clearly the next frame is meant to be a sexual assault. So it was really distressing and disturbing. That was the point at which a friend said, “You probably need to reach out to a lawyer.” Because each of these things we reported to X, and none of them contravened their terms and conditions. We just kept getting those sort of repeat emails coming back. “We’ve looked into this, and there’s nothing to see here.” So I did engage a lawyer, who sent a letter to X to ask for these to be removed, and they were. But it was at that point that he said, “I think you might actually have a case. We think that xAI have broken the law.” It’s impressive how you handled it, but it must have been really awful. It was; it was awful. This is done to demean, to degrade, and to push women out of online spaces. From my perspective, I tend to use bad or difficult things that happen as a way of thinking about how we change this for the future. My old boss was an amazing woman called Tessa Jowell. She used to say to me, “How do we change this negative energy into something positive?” “How do we work our way out of this into a place where we actually feel that we’ve learnt from it?” So I guess she instilled in me that sense that when something bad happens you’ve got a choice. You can wallow in it, you can try and forget about it, or you can use it as a catalyst for change. So I was quite trepidatious about the idea of taking on a legal action. Not least because of the person who is at the top of xAI, now SpaceXAI. [Eds. note: The company recently rebranded itself as SpaceXSI.] He’s the world’s richest man. But also because I didn’t want myself to necessarily be the story. Many, many women had things that were created of them through both Grok and other nudification tools that are much, much worse. Having said that, I knew that if there was the opportunity to say that actually they’d broken the law, there was an important point of principle on behalf of all of the women and the children whose images were manipulated and misused by Grok, who would never, ever be able to bring a legal case. So I decided that I wanted to do this, because I wanted to be able to show that no one is bigger than the law. Doesn’t matter how rich you are or how powerful you are or how big a reach you have in terms of your social media presence or who your friends might be at the top of various governments. If you break the law in our country, you need to feel the force of that. As an ex-lawyer and now as a legislator, it is important that we uphold our law where it has been broken. So it’s also about giving control back, I think, to us as individuals, but also as a society. So many of these digital changes have been done without our consent or say, and I think there’s a feeling that there’s a sort of runaway train that we’re all on, whether we want to be or not, because we all need to use online spaces for our work, for connection. And so my view is that we should be expecting companies to respect our law or at least make new laws to bring them more into line with what society really needs. You said that you gave it some thought. In that moment of trying to decide how to respond, what are you weighing up? Who are you talking to? Are you going back and talking to your team or your family to work out how you should respond, knowing that it may invite further speculation and further attention? My family mostly, my husband in particular. It’s one thing being a politician and arguing your case to change the law on behalf of women and children; it’s another having your own legal case. So I was worried about the impact that that might have on my family, my children. I also know that this can bring danger to politicians. So I worried about the fact that I am obviously engaging and making the defendant somebody who has got this very wide reach on social media. However, I don’t like bullies. I very strongly believe that it’s important to fight on the field that you’ve got, and this was an opportunity I felt to make a difference. So I weighed that up and thought that it was worth having that kind of attention and potential danger, because there is a bigger issue here that we need to get right. When you say you don’t like bullies, are you talking about, let’s face it, men who used