Ireland’s data protection watchdog, acting on behalf of the European Union, has launched an investigation into the use of personal data by Elon Musk’s platform X to train its AI chatbot, Grok, the watchdog announced on Friday.
The inquiry focuses on the “processing of personal data comprised of publicly accessible posts shared on the ‘X’ social media platform” by EU users, according to a statement from the Data Protection Commission (DPC).
“The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed to train the Grok large language models (LLMs),” the DPC said.
Grok is a collection of LLMs developed by Musk, which can be accessed via his social media platform X.
This follows a previous case launched by Ireland’s DPC last year, when X began using personal data from public posts made by European users, a move that was deemed to violate user privacy rights.
As X’s European headquarters is based in Ireland, the country’s data protection commission is the lead regulator for the platform in Europe.
In August of last year, X agreed to work with the DPC and suspend the use of such data, leading to the DPC dropping its case. However, the social media platform has continued to develop new AI models since then.
The Irish authority stated on Friday that it would now investigate X’s compliance with several key provisions of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including whether the data has been processed in a manner that is “lawful and transparent.”
