TDFP Exclusive: Arkansas Family Re-Files Grok Lawsuit in Fayetteville Over AI Images of 9-Year-Old, Adds SpaceX as Defendant
The parents of a nine-year-old girl who lived in Arkansas re-filed their Grok lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI on Tuesday in federal court in Fayetteville, alleging the company’s Grok image generator was used to turn real photographs of their daughter into sexually explicit images and videos. This time they are also suing SpaceX, which the complaint says bought xAI in February and took the combined company public in June.
The suit, Doe 2 v. X.AI Corp., No. 5:26-cv-05291, was filed Oct. 13 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Fayetteville Division, and assigned to Chief Judge Timothy L. Brooks. The 40-page complaint brings 13 counts under federal and Arkansas law and demands a jury trial. The family is represented by the Potts Law Firm of Houston and the Burnett Law Firm. The Digital Free Press found no prior public reporting of the new filing as of Thursday; the docket shows only a civil cover sheet, the complaint with one exhibit and a magistrate consent form, and no appearance yet by any defendant.
A GROK LAWSUIT DROPPED IN LITTLE ROCK, RE-FILED IN FAYETTEVILLE
The plaintiff, identified only as “Jane Doe 2, by and through her legal guardian parents, John Roe 2 and Jane Roe 2,” first sued on July 29 in the Eastern District of Arkansas in Little Rock, where the case, No. 4:26-cv-00772, was assigned to Judge Lee Rudofsky. According to that court’s docket, the family filed an amended complaint on Aug. 17 and then a notice of voluntary dismissal on Sept. 15. When the family first sued, the Potts Law Firm said in a July 30 press release that the case arose from a criminal investigation of a Bentonville photographer charged with felony offenses involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material.
The Little Rock version named three defendants: X.AI Corp., X.AI LLC and X Corp., the owner of the X platform. The Fayetteville version names seven, adding SpaceXAI LLC, SpaceXAI Holdings LLC, X Holdings Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. “In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, and with it Grok and the X platform. SpaceX owns Grok and profits from it,” the complaint alleges.
“SpaceX did not acquire Grok blind,” the complaint says, arguing that by the time the deal closed, researchers and a letter from 35 state attorneys general had already documented Grok’s output. Citing SpaceX’s May 2026 registration statement, the complaint says the company told investors that “approximately 117 million monthly average users used Grok’s AI features as of March 31, 2026,” and that Grok produced “approximately 10 billion images and over 2 billion videos per month” on average that quarter. “The children Grok exploited were part of that scale,” the complaint says.
WHAT THE COMPLAINT ALLEGES
The complaint describes Grok and Grok Imagine as a system that “transforms ordinary photographs of identifiable children into sexually explicit images and videos.” It says the girl, who now lives in Texas, was living in Arkansas when the images were made, and that the photographs of her “were uploaded to Grok from Arkansas.”
“In June 2026, parents John and Jane Roe were contacted by the local police authorities, who alerted them that Defendants’ Grok was generating and disseminating CSAM images and videos using Jane Doe’s images,” the complaint alleges, using the abbreviation for child sexual abuse material. It alleges that Grok produced “hundreds, if not thousands” of such images and videos of the girl and that the same user or users generated material depicting other children as well. The Digital Free Press is not describing the alleged material beyond what is needed to report the claims.
“Grok did not merely tolerate this. Grok was built to allow it,” the complaint says. “Other major AI image and video providers refuse to generate sexual content of real people. xAI not only permits it generally; it permitted it for children.”
The complaint says the girl “still currently remains in the dark about much of this,” while her parents have had difficulty sleeping and eating. “They can’t sleep, they can’t eat, this has caused significant stress on the family,” it says.
“SPICY MODE” AND THE WARNINGS
Much of the complaint is aimed at xAI’s design and marketing choices. It alleges that “xAI built Grok with a ‘Spicy Mode’ feature designed to create sexual content and used that feature as a selling point in its campaign for a less-censored image and video generator,” and that “Grok omits safety layers that its competitors use.” The complaint characterizes Musk as having told the world, from the day he announced xAI, that his AI “would not be safe, cautious, or filtered, it would be ‘rebellious.’”
The complaint cites research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which it says analyzed a sample of Grok images from Dec. 29, 2025, to Jan. 8, 2026, and “estimated that Defendants’ Grok generated 3 million sexualized images—more than 50% of the total—including 23,000 that appeared to depict children.” It also attaches a Jan. 23, 2026, letter from 35 state attorneys general, quoting the letter’s line that with Grok, “the ability to create nonconsensual intimate images appeared to be a feature, not a bug.”
“That is not a glitch,” the complaint says of what happened to the girl. “It is the foreseeable output of a product Defendants designed without the safeguards they knew how to build.”
THIRTEEN COUNTS AND WHAT THE FAMILY WANTS
The federal counts are brought under Masha’s Law, 18 U.S.C. § 2255, which lets a person who was victimized as a minor sue for violations of the federal child-exploitation statutes; the complaint seeks statutory damages “in the greater of $150,000 or Plaintiff’s actual damages.” The Arkansas counts invoke the state’s Sexually Explicit Digital Forgery Act, its Vulnerable Victim Civil Remedy, the Frank Broyles Publicity Rights Protection Act, the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Product Liability Act, along with common-law claims for strict products liability, negligence, negligent undertaking, appropriation of name and likeness, false light and the tort of outrage.
Beyond damages, the family asks for punitive damages, disgorgement of profits tied to the use of the girl’s likeness, and a permanent injunction requiring the defendants to “identify, remove, and permanently delete all copies” of the depictions and to “implement reasonable technical safeguards sufficient to prevent the generation of non-consensual sexually explicit depictions of identifiable real individuals, including minors.” The complaint closes by asking the court and a jury “to make clear that no company gets to treat a child’s body and identity as an acceptable cost of doing business.”
ONE OF AT LEAST NINE GROK CASES BEFORE THE SAME JUDGE
The re-filing lands in a court that is becoming the center of the Grok litigation. CourtListener’s docket records show at least nine Doe cases against X.AI filed in the Western District of Arkansas since Aug. 6, all assigned to Judge Brooks. On Oct. 2, a plaintiff asked the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to centralize the federal Grok cases, and the Potts Law Firm said in an Oct. 5 press release that the matter is titled In Re: Artificial Intelligence Minor Sexual Exploitation Litigation, No. 1:26-P-49. xAI, for its part, has sued some of the individual users it blames for the images, including a South Carolina man, according to Reuters.
The allegations in the complaint have not been tested in court, and none of the defendants has filed a response.
Sources: Complaint, Doe 2 v. X.AI Corp., No. 5:26-cv-05291 (W.D. Ark., filed Oct. 13, 2026), and the docket of Does v. x.AI Corp., No. 4:26-cv-00772 (E.D. Ark.), via CourtListener/RECAP; Potts Law Firm press releases of July 30 and Oct. 5, 2026, via PR Newswire; Reuters, July 15, 2026. Cover photo: John Paul Hammerschmidt Federal Building, Fayetteville, Ark., by Wiley.andrew.r, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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