French prosecutors raid X offices, summon Elon Musk in cybercrime probe

French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. The investigation was opened in January 2025 by the Paris prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity, and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organised group, among other charges.

Prosecutors also asked for Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino — CEO of X from 2023 to 2025 — to be present for “voluntary interviews” on April 20. Employees of X have also been summoned the same week. The investigation was first opened following reports by a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X were likely to have distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. It was later expanded after X’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust and spread sexually explicit deepfakes. Holocaust denial is a crime in France.

Grok wrote in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection” rather than for mass murder — language long associated with Holocaust denial. In later posts, the chatbot acknowledged that its earlier reply was wrong, said it had been deleted and pointed to historical evidence that Zyklon B in Auschwitz gas chambers was used to kill more than 1 million 
people.

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