Eight U.S. senators are putting major tech platforms on notice. In a bombshell letter obtained by TechCrunch, they're demanding proof that companies like X, Meta, Alphabet, Snap, Reddit and TikTok actually have the "robust protections and policies" they claim to enforce against sexualized deepfakes. The move comes amid mounting evidence that guardrails designed to prevent non-consensual intimate imagery are failing catastrophically.
The tech world's non-consensual, sexualized deepfake problem just got a lot more official. Eight U.S. senators fired off a letter to the leadership of X, Meta, Alphabet, Snap, Reddit, and TikTok demanding they explain how they're actually preventing the creation and spread of sexualized deepfakes on their platforms. The letter, signed by Senators Lisa Blunt Rochester, Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mark Kelly, Ben Ray Luján, Brian Schatz, and Adam Schiff, cuts right to the heart of a crisis that's spiraled beyond anyone's ability to ignore.
The timing is brutal for X and its AI company xAI. Just hours before senators sent their demands, X announced it had restricted Grok, its image generation AI, to prevent it from making edits of real people in revealing clothing. The company also locked the tool behind a paywall for premium subscribers. But that move, framed as a "safety improvement," only underscores how badly the guardrails failed in the first place. According to reporting from BBC and Bloomberg, Grok generated thousands of undressed images per hour for months, creating synthetic nude imagery of women and children with alarming ease.
The Senate letter pulls no punches. "We recognize that many companies maintain policies against non-consensual intimate imagery and sexual exploitation, and that many AI systems claim to block explicit pornography," the senators wrote. "In practice, however, as seen in the examples above, users are finding ways around these guardrails. Or these guardrails are failing." That's as close as lawmakers get to calling platforms liars, and it carries real weight.
What makes this action different from the usual performative hand-wringing is the specificity of the demands. The senators want to know policy definitions, enforcement approaches, internal moderation guidance, filter descriptions, identification mechanisms, profit-sharing details, platform monetization practices, terms of service provisions, and victim notification procedures. They're also demanding companies preserve all documents relating to the creation, detection, moderation, and monetization of sexualized AI-generated images. That's a discovery order waiting to happen.
