by Liv McMahon at BBC
The French offices of Elon Musk’s X have been raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit, as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.
The prosecutor’s office also said both Musk and former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino had been summoned to appear at hearings in April.
In a separate development, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced a probe into Musk’s AI tool, Grok, over its “potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”
Writing on X, Musk said the raid was a “political attack”.
X has previously characterised the French investigation as an attack on free speech.
The investigation began in January 2025 when French prosecutors started looking into content recommended by X’s algorithm, before being widened in July that year to include Musk’s controversial AI chatbot, Grok.
In a post at the time, X said the action was “politically-motivated” and denied allegations it had manipulated its algorithm.
Following today’s raid, French prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas.
Among potential crimes it said it would investigate were complicity in possession or organised distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people’s image rights with sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.