BRUSSELS — The European Commission opened a fresh investigation Monday into Elon Musk’s X following an explosion of non-consensual sexualized deepfakes created by the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

The Commission will decide whether X met EU requirements to protect users when it integrated Grok into the social media platform and its underlying algorithm.

X is already under investigation on several fronts under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which regulates social media platforms, and was in December fined €120 million for lapses in transparency. Penalties can reach up to 6 percent of X’s annual global revenue.

The new investigation will look into whether the company properly assessed and mitigated the risks of integrating Grok, particularly those of “manipulated sexually explicit images” including some that “may amount to child sexual abuse material,” the Commission said.

But the investigation “is much broader” than these images, a senior Commission official said during a briefing.

The chatbot may have generated as many as 3 million non-consensual sexual images and 20,000 child sexual abuse images in the 11 days before it made changes to stop the spread of such photos, an estimate by civil society found.

On top of the new investigation, the Commission will expand a 2023 probe to look into the impact of X’s decision, announced last week, to switch the algorithm for its social media platform to a Grok-based system.

The Commission said Monday it could take interim steps — for example, order X to change its algorithms or shut down the chatbot — “in the absence of meaningful adjustments to the X service,” something the EU has so far shied away from doing for Musk’s platform.

The threshold for such measures is “really high,” a second senior Commission official said.

The image-generating feature of Grok went viral just before the end of 2025, as users instructed the chatbot to alter images of real people. This led to global outcry and calls from EU lawmakers to ban nudification AI apps as well as crack down on Grok.

The platform did restrict the chatbot’s image generation abilities in January, initially by limiting them to paid subscribers of Grok. The Commission said at the time it was assessing whether changes made to Grok were sufficient.

EU officials found initial changes insufficient and voiced their concerns to the platform, after which the platform took further steps. “I dare say that without our interaction, probably none of these kind of changes that they have done would have appeared,” the second official said.

X did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.