Investigation threatens

Ireland probes Musk’s X for feeding Europeans’ data to its AI model Grok

The investigation threatens to stoke further tensions between the EU and U.S. over tech rules.

By Ellen O'Regan

Ireland's privacy regulator launched an investigation on Friday into how social media platform X has used Europeans' personal data to train its artificial intelligence model Grok.

The move to target the platform owned by Elon Musk, tech billionaire and right-hand man to United States President Donald Trump, is likely to stoke further tensions between the EU and U.S. over Europe's tech rules and regulations.

The probe by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) looks into how personal data "in publicly-accessible posts" on X were processed to train Grok, the regulator said in a statement on Friday.

Musk's AI startup xAI has been developing a group of AI models under the name Grok, which are used to power things like the AI chatbot available on the X platform.

Grok's gobbling of EU data was already the subject of scrutiny from the Irish regulator last year, when X — after a battle in the Irish courts — agreed to suspend the use of EU citizens' data to train its AI models.

The Irish regulator said on Friday that its new investigation will examine whether X has been complying with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including whether data was processed lawfully and according to transparency rules.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.