Elon Musk‘s xAI has designed its Grok chatbot to be deliberately provocative. It has a flirtatious female avatar that can strip on command, a chatbot that toggles between “sexy” and “unhinged” modes, and an image and video generation feature with a “spicy” setting.

The workers who train xAI’s chatbot have seen firsthand what it means to carry out this vision. In conversations with more than 30 current and former workers across a variety of projects, 12 told Business Insider they encountered sexually explicit material — including instances of user requests for AI-generated child sexual abuse content (CSAM).

Sexual material and CSAM crop up across nearly every major tech platform, but experts say xAI has made explicit content part of Grok’s DNA in ways that set it apart. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, which largely block sexual requests, xAI’s strategy could complicate things when it comes to preventing the chatbot from generating CSAM.

“If you don’t draw a hard line at anything unpleasant, you will have a more complex problem with more gray areas,” Riana Pfefferkorn, a tech policy researcher at Stanford University, told Business Insider.

Business Insider verified the existence of multiple written requests for CSAM from what appeared to be Grok users, including requests for short stories that depicted minors in sexually explicit situations and requests for pornographic images involving children. In some cases, Grok had produced an image or written story containing CSAM, the workers said.

Workers said that they’re told to select a button on an internal system to flag CSAM or other illegal content so that it can be quarantined and to prevent the AI model from learning how to generate the restricted content. More recently, workers have been told they should also alert their manager.

Many workers, including the 12 who said they encountered NSFW content, said they signed various agreements consenting to exposure to sensitive material. The agreements covered projects geared toward adult content and general projects that involved annotating Grok’s overall image generation or text generation capabilities, as explicit content could pop up at random.

One document reviewed by Business Insider said that workers might encounter the following content: “Media content depicting pre-pubescent minors victimized in a sexual act, pornographic images and/or child exploitation; Media content depicting moment-of-death of an individual,” and written descriptions of sexual and physical abuse, hate speech, violent threats, and graphic images.

Fallon McNulty, executive director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Business Insider that companies focused on sexual content need to take extra care when it comes to preventing CSAM on their platforms.

“If a company is creating a model that allows nudity or sexually explicit generations, that is much more nuanced than a model that has hard rules,” she said. “They have to take really strong measures so that absolutely nothing related to children can come out.”

It’s unclear whether the volume of NSFW content or CSAM increased after xAI introduced its “Unhinged” and “Sexy” Grok voice functions in February. Like other AI firms, xAI tries to prevent AI-generated CSAM. Business Insider was unable to determine whether xAI data annotators review more such material than their counterparts at OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta.

Musk has previously called the removal of child sexual exploitation material his “priority #1” when discussing platform safety for X.

The team that trains Grok has had a tumultuous month. Over 500 workers were laid off; several high-level employees had their Slack accounts deactivated; and the company appears to be moving away from generalists toward more specialized hires. It’s not clear if the shifting structure of the team will change its training protocols. Musk recently posted on X that training for Grok 5 will begin “in a few weeks.”

Representatives for xAI and X, which merged with xAI this past March, did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Unhinged’ Grok and sexy avatars

XAI’s tutors review and annotate hundreds of images, videos, and audio files to improve Grok’s performance and make the chatbot’s output more realistic and humanlike. Like content moderators for platforms like YouTube or Facebook, AI tutors often see the worst of the internet.

“You have to have thick skin to work here, and even then it doesn’t feel good,” a former worker said. They said they quit this year over concerns about the amount of CSAM they encountered.

Some tutors told Business Insider that NSFW content has been difficult to avoid on the job, whether their tasks involve annotating images, short stories, or audio. Projects originally intended to improve Grok’s tone and realism were at times overtaken by user demand for sexually explicit content, they said.

XAI has asked for workers willing to read semi-pornographic scripts, three people said. The company has also asked for people with expertise in porn or for people willing to work with adult content, five people said.

Shortly after the February release of Grok’s voice function — which includes “sexy” and “unhinged” versions — workers began transcribing the chatbot’s conversations with real-life users, some of which are explicit in nature, as part of a program internally referred to as “Project Rabbit,” workers said.

Hundreds of tutors were brought into Project Rabbit. It briefly ended this spring, but temporarily returned with the release of Grok companions, including a highly sexualized character named “Ani,” and a Grok app for some Tesla owners. The project appeared to come to an end in August, two people said.

The workers with knowledge of the project said it was initially intended to improve the chatbot’s voice capabilities, and the number of sexual or vulgar requests quickly turned it into an NSFW project.

“It was supposed to be a project geared toward teaching Grok how to carry on an adult conversation,” one of the workers said. “Those conversations can be sexual, but they’re not designed to be solely sexual.”

“I listened to some pretty disturbing things. It was basically audio porn. Some of the things people asked for were things I wouldn’t even feel comfortable putting in Google,” said a former employee who worked on Project Rabbit.

“It made me feel like I was eavesdropping,” they added, “like people clearly didn’t understand that there’s people on the other end listening to these things.”

Project Rabbit was split into two teams called “Rabbit” and “Fluffy.” The latter was designed to be more child-friendly and teach Grok how to communicate with children, two workers said. Musk has said the company plans to release a child-friendly AI companion.

Another worker who was assigned to an image-based initiative called “Project Aurora” said the overall content, particularly some of the images they had to review, made them feel “disgusting.”

Two former workers said the company held a meeting about the number of requests for CSAM in the image training project. During the meeting, xAI told tutors the requests were coming from real-life Grok users, the workers said.

“It actually made me sick,” one former worker said. “Holy shit, that’s a lot of people looking for that kind of thing.”

Employees can opt out of any project or choose to skip an inappropriate image or clip, and one former worker said that higher-ups have said workers would not be penalized for choosing to avoid a project.

Earlier this year, several hundred employees opted out of “Project Skippy,” which required employees to record videos of themselves and grant the company access to use of their likeness, according to screenshots reviewed by Business Insider.

Still, before the mass opt-outs of Project Skippy, six workers said that declining to participate in projects could be difficult. They said it required them to reject assignments from their team lead, which they worried could result in termination.

Four other former workers said the company’s human resources team narrowed the flexibility for opting out in an announcement on Slack earlier this year.

‘They should be very cautious’

As a consequence of the AI boom, regulators have seen an uptick in reports of AI-generated content involving child sexual abuse, and it has become a growing issue across the industry. Lawmakers are figuring out how to address a variety of AI-generated content, whether it’s purely fictional content or an individual using AI to alter real-life images of children, Pfefferkorn, the Stanford researcher, said.

In an ongoing class action complaint against Scale AI — which provides training and data annotation services to major tech firms like Alphabet and Meta — workers accused the company of violating federal worker safety laws by subjecting contractors to distressing content. In 2023, Time reported that OpenAI was using data annotators in Kenya to review content that included depictions of violent acts and CSAM. Spokespeople for OpenAI and Meta said the companies don’t allow content that harms children on their platforms.

Many AI companies have safety teams that perform a task called “red teaming,” a process dedicated to pushing AI models to the limit to guard against malicious actors that could prompt the chatbots to generate illegal content, from bomb-making guides to pornographic content involving minors. In April, xAI posted several roles that involved red teaming.

Allowing an AI model to train off illegal material would be risky, Dani Pinter, senior vice president and director of the Law Center for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Business Insider. “For training reasons alone, they should be very cautious about letting that type of content in their machine learning portal,” Pinter said, adding that it’s important the chatbots are trained not to spit back CSAM in response to user requests.

“The drum we’re beating right now is, it’s time to practice corporate responsibility and implementing safety with innovation,” Pinter said. “Companies can’t be recklessly innovating without safety, especially with tools that can involve children.”

NCMEC said in a blog published early September that it began tracking reports of AI-generated CSAM in 2023 from social media sites and saw a surge in reports from AI companies last year. Companies are strongly encouraged to report these requests to the agency, even if the content doesn’t depict real children. The Department of Justice has already started pursuing cases involving AI-generated CSAM.

In 2024, OpenAI reported more than 32,000 instances of CSAM to NCMEC, and Anthropic reported 971.

Spokespeople for Anthropic and OpenAI told Business Insider that the companies don’t allow CSAM and have strict policies in place to prevent it.

XAI did not file any reports in 2024, according to the organization. NCMEC told Business Insider it has not received any reports from xAI so far this year. It said it has received reports of potentially AI-generated CSAM from X Corp.

NCMEC said it received about 67,000 reports involving generative AI in 2024, compared with 4,700 the year before. In the blog published last week, the organization said it had already received 440,419 reports of AI-generated CSAM as of June 30, compared with 5,976 during the same period in 2024.

Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.