Irish Data watchdog to investigate X’s Grok AI tool

By Jonathan McCambridge, PA

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has begun an investigation into the Grok artificial intelligence model on the X social media platform.

The inquiry will examine the processing of personal data in publicly accessible posts on X by EU users, for the purposes of training generative artificial intelligence models, in particular the Grok Large Language Models (LLMs).

A DPC statement said: “The inquiry will examine compliance with a range of key provisions of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), including about the lawfulness and transparency of the processing.”

Grok is the name of a group of AI models developed by xAI.

These models are used to power a generative AI querying tool, which is available on the X platform, owned by Elon Musk.

The DPC said: “The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs.”