Irish Regulator Investigates Grok AI for Misusing EU Personal Data

DUBLIN () – On Friday, Ireland’s data protection authority announced the initiation of an inquiry concerning social media platform X due to concerns about the utilization of personally identifiable information gathered from EU users to develop its artificial intelligence system called Grok.

The Ireland Data Protection Commission (DPC) serves as the primary supervisory authority for X within the European Union because X conducts its EU activities from Ireland. The DPC holds the authority to levy penalties amounting to up to 4% of a firm’s total worldwide income according to the stringent guidelines set forth by the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The investigation will examine "how personal information from public postings made by European Economic Area users on the X social media platform is processed for use in training generative artificial intelligence systems," according to a statement released by the Data Protection Commission.

President Donald Trump along with other officials in his administration have condemned the European Union's regulations targeting American corporations and labeled the penalties levied against U.S. technology firms by the EU as a type of tax.

The owner of X, Elon Musk—who ranks as the wealthiest individual globally and serves as a key advisor to Trump—has similarly criticized European Union regulations, particularly those established by institutions in Brussels concerning online material.

This ruling comes after a legal case in the previous year when the Irish regulatory body requested an injunction against X to prevent them from using EU user data for their artificial intelligence system development.

X committed to ceasing the use of personal data gathered from EU users for training its AI systems prior to those users having the opportunity to revoke their consent. Following this, the Irish regulatory body concluded its legal action a few weeks thereafter, noting that X had concurred to these restrictions on an indefinite basis.

The influential Irish data protection authority has penalized companies such as Microsoft's LinkedIn, TikTok, and Meta since being granted the ability to impose fines in 2018. The aggregate penalties levied against Meta amount to nearly three billion euros so far.

X, which was known at the time as Twitter, hasn't encountered penalties since the Data Protection Commission imposed a fine of €450,000 ($511,000) back in 2020—the initial sanction issued by the regulator following the implementation of the updated data protection framework.

($1 = 0.8808 euros)

(Conor Humphries writing; editing by Catarina Demony)