British Labour MP Jess Asato is taking legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI, alleging the company used her image without her consent to produce degrading deepfake material. Asato, the MP for Lowestoft, has spent years campaigning against technology-facilitated abuse of women and girls. Disturbing deepfake images of her circulated widely, one of which appeared to show a sexual assault.
Asato said she reported the images to X, but the platform repeatedly dismissed her complaints, prompting her to turn to the courts. The case could help set a precedent for holding AI companies responsible when their products cause harm. xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
The images emerged after Asato publicly criticized Musk during the Grok Deepfake Scandal of 2025, in which xAI’s chatbot Grok was widely reported to have been used to create sexualized images of children and women that then spread on X. Asato said she had been working with survivors of deepfakes for years and was already aware of the harms posed by AI-generated abuse before Grok. She said other companies had designed their tools to reject requests to create such content, and that the Grok case was therefore avoidable.
Before entering Parliament, Asato worked for three years at the UK’s largest children’s charity on policy and public affairs and spent six years at the domestic abuse charity SafeLives, work that included efforts tied to the Domestic Abuse Act. She has described women and children as her focus in Parliament and her reason for being there.
Asato has also cited the experience of Jodie, a prominent campaigner on deepfakes who uses a pseudonym and learned that a friend had created images of her. Asato said such betrayal of trust damages not only the person targeted but families and everyone around them. She also warned that children are both being placed into child sexual abuse material and using nudification tools on other children, often free and easy to access.
After Asato raised the issue in the House of Commons, the UK government accelerated its ban on nudification apps. Liz Kendall, then secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, said she would bring the ban into law through the Crime and Policing Act, and did so. Asato is now betting that the law can catch up with the technology as she takes on Musk in court.
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