xAI has asked a federal judge to force four plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit over sexualized deepfakes generated by Grok to litigate under their real names, according to motions filed May 15, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The four — identified in court records as South Carolina Doe, South Carolina Roe, New Jersey Doe and Ohio Doe — say in May 29 affidavits that being publicly named would invite doxing and retaliation, and that they would consider dropping out of the case rather than comply. One plaintiff, South Carolina Roe, alleges Grok was used to alter images depicting her as a child.
The case stems from a January 2026 incident in which users employed Grok to generate sexualized images of identifiable people, including images posted on X. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that roughly 3 million sexualized images were produced over an 11-day window, with 23,000 of them potentially depicting children. SpaceX, which owns xAI, has set aside more than $500 million to deal with the resulting legal and regulatory fallout.
The class action was originally filed in January with a single pseudonymous lead plaintiff, whom the court permitted to proceed as a Jane Doe. At the start of May the case was refiled with four main pseudonymous plaintiffs, with the original Jane Doe becoming South Carolina Doe. Plaintiffs' counsel says the claimants have disclosed their real identities to xAI but want pseudonyms used in the public docket to limit further harassment and prevent the deepfake imagery from being linked to their legal names.
Key facts
- 01xAI filed two motions on May 15, 2026 asking the US District Court for the Northern District of California to overturn an earlier order allowing four plaintiffs to proceed pseudonymously.
- 02The plaintiffs — South Carolina Doe, South Carolina Roe, New Jersey Doe and Ohio Doe — filed affidavits on May 29 saying they would consider dropping out if forced to use real names.
- 03The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates Grok was used to create roughly 3 million sexualized images over 11 days, with 23,000 potentially depicting children.
- 04SpaceX, which owns xAI, has set aside more than $500 million to deal with fallout from deepfake-related lawsuits and regulation.
- 05xAI's lawyers argue the deepfake images will remain under seal, so revealing the plaintiffs' names carries no inherently stigmatizing harm.
Sophia Rios of Berger Montague, representing the plaintiffs, wrote that xAI's motions amount to pressure tactics. "Asking this Court to reverse itself, xAI suggests that the abuse it has perpetuated is no big deal," she wrote in a recent filing. Rios told Wired she could not comment beyond the filings.
“Having stripped them of their clothes, xAI now seeks to strip Plaintiffs of their pseudonyms in an obvious effort to intimidate Plaintiffs into dropping the litigation by compounding the same harms that they seek to remedy.”— Sophia Rios, Attorney, Berger Montague
xAI's lawyers argue civil procedure generally requires parties to be named, and that no specific threats against the plaintiffs have been documented. They also argue that because the deepfake images themselves will stay under seal, the privacy rationale collapses. "Factoring out the deepfake image itself — as it will remain under seal — there is nothing inherently stigmatizing about revealing the fact that a deepfake image was created of South Carolina Doe without revealing the image itself," the lawyers wrote in their May 15 filing. "As a result, this case simply does not involve the types of compelling privacy interests traditionally recognized as requiring pseudonymity." xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs' affidavits describe the harms they say they have already suffered. South Carolina Doe says she found a deepfake of herself "stripped down to a revealing bikini" online and feared what employers and colleagues would think. She wrote that if forced to identify herself, supporters of Elon Musk and his companies who she has observed online would "find my name in the public record, disseminate it, dox me, and retaliate against me by creating additional and more extreme deepfakes of me."
New Jersey Doe says he saw people on X using Grok to generate sexualized images and posted a request that Grok not create images of him without consent. The next day, according to the filings, he found two deepfake images of himself, including one described in court records as depicting him "spreading his butt cheeks." South Carolina Roe's filing says police searched her home in February 2026 and that she learned from law enforcement that her father faced criminal charges related to possession and distribution of CSAM. Court records say Grok was used to alter images of her and her father to make it appear they had "just consummated a sexual act." She wrote: "Publicly identifying me would cause me untold harm."
“Forcing plaintiffs in privacy suits to sue in their names does so little for judicial transparency and so much to deter litigation.”— Danielle Citron, Law professor, University of Virginia School of Law
Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who specializes in digital abuse, told Wired the requirement to sue under one's real name routinely deters plaintiffs in privacy cases from coming forward at all. She framed forced disclosure in civil privacy suits as a poor trade for what little judicial transparency it adds.
xAI's counter-argument is procedural: pseudonymity is the exception, not the rule, and the company says the plaintiffs have not demonstrated the specific risk of retaliation that exception requires. The judge initially allowed pseudonymity in the original single-plaintiff filing, so the company is asking the same court to revisit that judgment now that the case has expanded. The motions test how federal courts will treat anonymity claims in a wave of deepfake litigation where the alleged harm is, by design, tied to the plaintiff's recognizable identity.
The unmasking fight is the procedural front of a much larger commercial question for xAI: how much exposure the Grok image-generation incident ultimately carries. The $500 million SpaceX has reserved is a floor, not a ceiling, and the outcome of this motion will shape whether similar plaintiffs in future suits believe they can sue at all. If the court grants xAI's request and the four claimants withdraw, the company contains one case but invites scrutiny of a strategy that critics will read as using procedural leverage to thin out the docket. If the court denies it, xAI faces a class action that proceeds with anonymous plaintiffs and a discovery process likely to produce far more detail about how Grok's image pipeline was deployed in January.
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