Inside the 48-hour Grok crisis that put X in MeitY’s crosshairs

Mint.During the hour-long meeting, X executives explained how the image-editing feature functioned. They offered an example: if billionaire Elon Musk appeared in a photograph alongside other technology executives and users prompted the tool to remove “the most racist person”, Grok might remove Musk, this person said.The explanation failed to reassure regulators.

Officials asked X to comply with local laws. Soon after the meeting ended, X’s India leadership escalated the matter to its global compliance team, an official aware of the conversation said.X was represented by Vinay Prakash, its resident grievance and chief compliance officer, and Japreet Grewal, its government affairs officer.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022, X has maintained a lean India team and does not have a designated India head following the departure of its former policy chief Samiran Gupta in September 2023.What followed over the next 48 hours pushed the issue beyond political satire or image manipulation, and into the realm of mass online abuse. Grok’s image-editing features were widely used to generate sexualised images of women without consent, prompting a flood of complaints and drawing regulatory scrutiny.By Friday afternoon, MeitY had been pushed to a corner.

By evening, it issued a formal notice to X. Mint has seen a copy of the notice, sent around 7 pm on Friday.The notice, another person directly aware of the developments told Mint on condition of anonymity, took the company by surprise.

“X remains in compliance with India’s legal requirements, and speaks with the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) every week. At no point in prior conversations were sexual content issues brought up before, as recently as two days before