Disturbing and degrading deepfake images of the MP circulated widely. One appeared to depict a sexual assault. When Asato reported them to X, the platform repeatedly dismissed her complaints. So she decided to take the fight somewhere else: the courts. She is now pursuing legal action against Musk’s xAI, arguing that it unlawfully used her image without her consent. The case could help establish a precedent for holding AI companies accountable when their products cause harm.

For Asato, this is personal, but it is hardly new territory. Before entering Parliament, she spent years working with charities supporting survivors of domestic abuse and vulnerable children. That experience has shaped her political career, informing her push for stronger protections for women and children online. Now, she is confronting more troubling questions: What happens when the technology enabling abuse becomes ubiquitous, the platforms hosting it refuse to intervene, and the people targeted are left to fight back on their own?

At stake for Asato is more than the misuse of a single image. It is whether consent still means anything when AI can manufacture almost anything, and whether the companies building these tools can be made to answer for what they do. Asato is betting that the law can catch up with the technology. And she is prepared to take on Musk to find out. (xAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.) Also, before you read on, be aware that this interview includes references to sexual assault and child sex abuse. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ROSIE SWASH: Jess, I just want to have a couple of warm-up questions before we get into it. Tell us a bit about your background, how did you end up becoming MP for Lowestoft?

JESS ASATO: Sure. So, I grew up in East Anglia in Norfolk and Suffolk, and in a not very political family. I got the politics bug in 1997 when Tony Blair was talking about education, education, education. Having experienced it, I felt that we could be doing a lot better in our education system. So I joined the Labour Party and got involved with my local groups.

Before Parliament, I worked for the largest children's charity in the UK for three years on their policy and public affairs, trying to change legislation on behalf of the most vulnerable children in the country. Six years prior to that I worked for a domestic abuse charity called SafeLives where we did huge amounts of work to try and improve the situation for survivors of domestic abuse, particularly through the Domestic Abuse Act.

Those twin issues of women and children have become my focus in Parliament, and I’ve been very clear that my reason for being here, my mission really, is to be a voice for women and children.

Well, that’s a good entry point for us to start talking about this year. So in early 2026, there was widespread reporting on Grok, xAI’s chatbot, being used to create sexualized images of children and women, and those images being circulated on X. How aware were you at this point of the phenomenon of deepfakes being used in this way?

Very aware, and actually had been working with survivors who had experienced deepfakes for quite a number of years. Ever since the advent of AI this has been happening to women, and there’s also been developing risks of children both being put into child sexual abuse material and also children using nudification tools on other children, thereby criminalizing themselves because these tools are so easy to access and often free.

So I was already very alive to the huge harms being created by AI deepfakes of both women and children before Grok ever happened. It was a known harm, which is why many of the tools from other companies had already taken steps to stop them from being used to create this kind of content.

There are a number of tools where, if you type in “nudify,” or “take the clothes off this person,” the tool will refuse to do that. So into that environment came Grok.

Was there a particularly egregious example or incident prior to Grok when you became aware of deepfakes that really stuck with you?

There is a brilliant campaigner who goes by the name of Jodie. I think it was probably listening to the experiences of Jodie, who was deepfaked, and it was such an affront to her that somebody would do this, and then she found out it was actually a friend. Such a betrayal of trust.

These things destroy not just the individual involved, but often families and everyone around them too.

For people who don’t know, who exactly was Jodie? Is this a constituent of yours or someone who came forward to you specifically?

No, no, no. She's a very well-known campaigner on this issue. That’s not her real name. I know it sounds obvious, but what exactly is nudification?

It is where you ask an AI tool to take the image or video of a real person and use generative AI to make that person either nude, partially nude, or engaging in pornographic acts. This is something that, because of the photorealistic nature of AI images, it has become increasingly hard to see what is a fake image. It can often look incredibly, incredibly real.

So what was it particularly about the Grok scandal earlier this year that made you want to raise this in the House of Commons?

It was the fact that we already knew that you could stop this from happening by designing the AI tool to reject the ability to do this.

This was completely avoidable. That’s why I spoke out, but also because I’d just spent a year and a half campaigning to get a ban on nudification apps, and here was an all-purpose AI tool becoming a nudification app.

It just felt to me as though we were making strides in the UK, and then the world’s richest man and his product decided to turn the clock back. So what exactly did you stand up and say?

What I did was I talked about the need for the government to accelerate its ban on nudification apps, which it did. So the then secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Liz Kendall, said that she was going to bring that ban into law through the Crime and Policing Act, which she did.

But I also said that it was very important that we went further than that, because, of course, Grok itself is not a sole-purpose nudification tool. It has a general use, and therefore we needed to bring all AI chatbots under the auspices of the Online Safety Act. That is also what eventually happened in the Crime and Policing Act, and we’re now waiting until that legislation comes into effect. There’s got to be a consultation, I understand, before it does.

So technically another Grok could happen in this period, but in the future there would be much stronger measures that we could take against tools like Grok creating nudification content.

So that’s a really positive outcome of your interjection in Parliament, but what else happened as a result of you standing up?

Well, one of the things that happened was that I posted on social media saying that Elon Musk should stop Grok from being able to do this.

And then, of course, I became a victim of the same trend. So Grok put this woman in a bikini. And most of the images were sort of pornified, I would say. They weren’t nude images, but they were me with inflated boobs in a bikini.

Then people tried to make it funny, I guess, by putting a swastika on me or hammer and sickles. Or making me pregnant with quintuplets and putting me in a kitchen. Because of course that’s the only use for women—birthing and making dinner. But the really disturbing one was a video of me being surrounded by a group of men, chloroformed over my mouth, and then I fall backwards onto a chair. Then my skirts are lifted up. So no nudity, but clearly the next frame is meant to be a sexual assault. So it was really distressing and disturbing.

That was the point at which a friend said, “You probably need to reach out to a lawyer.”Because each of these things we reported to X, and none of them contravened their terms and conditions. We just kept getting those sort of repeat emails coming back. “We’ve looked into this, and there’s nothing to see here.”So I did engage a lawyer, who sent a letter to X to ask for these to be removed, and they were.

But it was at that point that he said, “I think you might actually have a case. We think that xAI have broken the law.”It’s impressive how you handled it, but it must have been really awful.

It was; it was awful. This is done to demean, to degrade, and to push women out of online spaces. From my perspective, I tend to use bad or difficult things that happen as a way of thinking about how we change this for the future.

My old boss was an amazing woman called Tessa Jowell. She used to say to me, “How do we change this negative energy into something positive?”“How do we work our way out of this into a place where we actually feel that we’ve learnt from it?”So I guess she instilled in me that sense that when something bad happens you’ve got a choice. You can wallow in it, you can try and forget about it, or you can use it as a catalyst for change.

So I was quite trepidatious about the idea of taking on a legal action. Not least because of the person who is at the top of xAI, now SpaceXAI. [Eds. note: The company recently rebranded itself as SpaceXSI.] He’s the world’s richest man. But also because I didn’t want myself to necessarily be the story. Many, many women had things that were created of them through both Grok and other nudification tools that are much, much worse.

Having said that, I knew that if there was the opportunity to say that actually they’d broken the law, there was an important point of principle on behalf of all of the women and the children whose images were manipulated and misused by Grok, who would never, ever be able to bring a legal case. So I decided that I wanted to do this, because I wanted to be able to show that no one is bigger than the law.

Doesn’t matter how rich you are or how powerful you are or how big a reach you have in terms of your social media presence or who your friends might be at the top of various governments. If you break the law in our country, you need to feel the force of that. As an ex-lawyer and now as a legislator, it is important that we uphold our law where it has been broken.

So it’s also about giving control back, I think, to us as individuals, but also as a society. So many of these digital changes have been done without our consent or say, and I think there’s a feeling that there’s a sort of runaway train that we’re all on, whether we want to be or not, because we all need to use online spaces for our work, for connection.

And so my view is that we should be expecting companies to respect our law or at least make new laws to bring them more into line with what society really needs.

You said that you gave it some thought. In that moment of trying to decide how to respond, what are you weighing up? Who are you talking to? Are you going back and talking to your team or your family to work out how you should respond, knowing that it may invite further speculation and further attention?

My family mostly, my husband in particular. It’s one thing being a politician and arguing your case to change the law on behalf of women and children; it’s another having your own legal case.

So I was worried about the impact that that might have on my family, my children. I also know that this can bring danger to politicians. So I worried about the fact that I am obviously engaging and making the defendant somebody who has got this very wide reach on social media. However, I don’t like bullies. I very strongly believe that it’s important to fight on the field that you’ve got, and this was an opportunity I felt to make a difference.

So I weighed that up and thought that it was worth having that kind of attention and potential danger, because there is a bigger issue here that we need to get right.

When you say you don’t like bullies, are you talking about, let’s face it, men who used Grok in this way in the first place, or are you talking about Elon Musk?

I’m talking about the men who use this as a form of trying to push women out of the online space. Actually it was quite clear in quite a lot of the comments that they were saying, “Well, if you don’t like this, then get off the platform.”Either that or, “If this is too hot for you, get out the kitchen,” which I always find quite funny because they put me in a kitchen. I think it’s really interesting when you look at X in terms of its demographics in the UK, it’s highly weighted toward men. I think some of that’s down to the fact that there is just so much misogyny and abuse on it. So I’m assuming, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the other side of the response to going public is that other women have come forward to you.

Absolutely. Actually, one of the heartening things has been people coming forward and saying, “Thank you, because this has now given me the license to actually accept that what happened to me wasn’t my fault. It’s not my shame.”So, in a way, what I’m hoping is that this has helped some victims to process what has happened to them and understand that this was not right.

I’ve also had emails from parents where they’ve said that this has happened to their daughter. It’s been done by boys at school. I’ve had teachers saying that boys have made pornographic AI imagery of them. And it’s something where we’ve just sort of let it happen and wash over us and accept that somehow this is now a part of the society we live in.

So yes quite a number of people have come forward. Obviously not all of their experiences have been through Grok, and I think one of the things is that often, when you see these films or images, you don’t know what platform they’ve been created on. I mean, the only reason why I knew it was Grok was because it was integrated with X, and you could see the commands that had been given by the users.

But much of the time, when this content is created, most victims don’t know by whom or on what platform. And so there’s really very little they can do about it. And I think it’s that sort of sense of helplessness that you have been violated, and that is the word that comes up so frequently from victims of this particular issue.

It’s not just that it’s nudified. Of course, much of my content wasn’t. It’s the lack of consent. And lots of people say, “Oh, but it’s fake. It’s just a laugh.”But what people don’t understand is that it is hyperrealistic, and it’s your face.

It’s a piece of your soul. It’s not just pixels on the internet. It is a person. And because obviously I’ve worked for a long time in violence against women and girls and spoken to many victims of sexual assault and to children who’ve been victims of child sexual abuse, it is the lack of consent that is so disturbing.

It can leave people with PTSD and quite deep trauma. And there have been a number of people I’ve met who have said that the world seems less safe to them because this has happened to them.

I think you’ve already touched on it, but what is the biggest myth around deepfakes that you would wish to dispel? That it comes without any harm. That it’s just a laugh.

There is clear harm, even when it’s not done to demean or degrade. So even if it’s done sometimes by friends, the fact is that you haven’t consented to that. There is something about the human psyche which is that when you see yourself so realistically created in a different situation or scenario, something that’s not something you would have done, I think it’s quite discombobulating.

I think your brain can’t quite process it because your brain knows it’s not true, but it looks very true. And I think psychologically we still don’t really understand how this content is going to change the way we think about our world, how we know what is true and what isn’t true. Right.

Now, of course, you can do fantastic things with generative AI. All I’m calling for is that we respect people’s consent, and that’s why one of the things I’ve been working on since this happened is to look at whether we could create a system of consent to be manipulated by AI.

Could we create a greater right over our likeness online so that there’s a new social norm, which is that no, you can’t copy and paste that picture into an AI chatbot and do whatever you want with it. That’s not yours. It’s not your data. It’s their data, and you’re breaching the law if you do that.

I think if we were to do that, we could have a wide range of applications. It wouldn’t just be in this space of the sexualization of women and children. But also with political disinformation. We are so close to a moment where somebody produces a hyperrealistic video of a politician saying something that they didn’t, and then that leads to real-world harm. And so we’ve got to find a new social norm that says unless for public figures it’s parody or satire—and absolutely you’ve got to protect that—but in all other instances your picture, your voice, and your moving image is your personal data, and it’s not for anyone else to use.

So that’s interesting because you’re touching on new social norms and the possibility of new laws to keep up with this technology. But your lawsuit is specifically under a data law. Talk to me about that versus a law around consensual imagery or deepfakes specifically.

So, my case is brought under existing law, the GDPR, the data protection law, and it contends that Grok misused my data without my consent. It didn’t have consent to process my data, the data being my face and my likeness. But also under privacy laws that I had a reasonable expectation of privacy and that particularly the video of me being prepared for sexual assault reaches a criminal threshold and that nobody should be expected to be on the receiving end of.

Let’s remember, this is actually a product that has been designed by software engineers and developers, and that actually products should not lead to an invasion of privacy and the harm that I then experienced as a result of that, including distress and a sense that I was being harassed by this particular creation of this particular video.

So, it rests on good solid legal grounds, and we await the defense from SpaceX AI.

I don’t know how much you can say, legally, but what part of the process are you in? What happens next? What’s the timeline for a resolution to this case?

So like with a lot of legal cases, it’s very, very hard to pin down a timeline. But my understanding is that we should be receiving the response and the defense from SpaceXAI in the near future. But we don’t have a deadline or a particular time that I can put on it.

After that, my understanding is that the case will then be looked at, and if there is a case to answer, then it will go to a court hearing. But once again, no idea when that might be. And I think there’s lots of legal things that I don’t understand that need to be worked out in the meantime as well between my lawyers and their lawyers.

Have you ever had any acknowledgment on X itself from Elon Musk or anyone at xAI about this case? Has he ever spoken publicly about it? Would you expect him to?

I don’t think so. They clearly want to challenge this case, and so the best place to do that, I think, is in the courts and to leave it to see whether the merits of the case come through.

You were in New York recently to address the city council about your case. You didn’t get to speak to anyone directly at the company, is that right?

No. I mean, despite being subpoenaed, they didn’t turn up. Four of the other frontier AI companies did attend under subpoena. SpaceXAI didn’t, but they eventually did get their hearing with SpaceX in the city council. So, they have now had their opportunity to put questions and indeed did raise my case with them, I understand.

Was it a little enraging to attend a hearing like that where a company that you’re suing doesn't bother turning up?

I think it’s quite rude to the elected members of the New York City Council when you are a business that operates in New York. Indeed, I was told that they were just a few subway stops from City Hall. So I had traveled quite a long way from England to be there. And they couldn’t be bothered to turn up, which yeah, it felt arrogant and a bit of a snub, but they’ve now got there, so that’s a good thing.

Since you made the decision to take this to the courts, there have been a number of proposals in Parliament, notably there was a proposal for a kill switch bill at one point. Now I believe it’s dead or it’s not going very well. Is that right?

So, yes, there have been proposals put forward for a kill switch. And my understanding is the government rejected that. There continues to be strong calls for regulation of particularly superintelligent AI. We’ve heard various theories, whether it’s 2 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent risk of human extinction from this sort of race to superintelligence, a recursive AI, and we wouldn’t allow those margins of risk in any other sphere.

We would not allow it in bridge building or airplane making. They didn’t even allow it when they were testing the nuclear bomb and the Trinity test. It feels to me as though so much of this decision-taking is outside of democratic structures. It’s not with the public. It is being done by some incredibly, exceptionally wealthy companies and organizations who say they have the interests of the planet at heart.

But each time, actually, they’re asked about whether that is the future of humanity or whether they think that these risks could kill humanity, there’s a sort of shrugging of the shoulders and, “We’ll just keep going because we want to make money,” I guess.

It has been reported in the British press that there are members of Parliament, some of whom are working on committees to do with technology, who still don’t really understand what AI is. And clearly you’re not one of them because you’re aware of the dangers of this issue. But do you feel working across parties that you’re still having to explain technology and its dangers and possibilities to people who are making laws, or should be making laws, to protect the public from AI?

Well, look, I don’t think that’s only the case about AI. We are humans after all, and we have to deal with every single subject that exists under the sun. We have to get our heads around things that we’ve never heard of before. A bit like being a journalist actually.

That’s true. But you have to then make laws and decisions. So, I don’t want to be unfair to my colleagues.

You may be a specialist in housing policy and you then need to get your head around AI. But I would say that this is the most important issue in front of anybody in parliament or politics at the moment, and therefore, everyone needs to get their head around AI.

My background is in social policy for women and children. But because we did quite a lot of work on the Online Safety Act when I was working for a children’s charity, we campaigned to get the age verification ban for children in pornography into the OSA. And indeed, created quite a strong piece of legislation in respect of that.

We had to get our heads around online safety on the online space. The problem was, of course, that act didn’t include AI chatbots. There were a number of amendments that tried to get it in and we would’ve been in a much better place had we actually succeeded.

But you know, I’m still not a tech expert even though I had quite a while to try to understand these things. But my view is that this is definitely the new front line of where harms are occurring. We can see that hugely in the increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material, which is absolutely exploding.

In the end it comes down to the people who create the products. And that’s why we should be seeing digital product regulation in the same way as we would any other product regulation.

I’m very, very hopeful that the government is going to look at it really, really closely because there are always design choices that you can make and that can help to prevent these harms, these harms that are completely knowable. We can predict these harms, and so it should be easy to design them out from the start. Companies can put in more safeguards. Why don’t they?

Profit. But also, let’s be honest, these are global tools and companies. So unless you have international agreement it is a bit like playing whack-a-mole, isn’t it?

The person who made that horrible video of me being chloroformed lives in the US, so the police aren’t gonna follow it up because they’re out of the country. Do you know who did it?

I don’t know who they are, but the police did find who they were because it’s a criminal offense what they did. They just weren’t able to bring the charge.

We’ve spoken in the last 40 minutes about the full spectrum of human awfulness. I don’t think there’s any area of it that we haven’t …Oh, sorry. Welcome to my life.

I’m really struck by how cheerful you are despite this. How do you remain so upbeat and hopeful while dealing with all of this?

Because you’ve always got to have hope for the future. I do have a really strong conviction that with the right group of people pushing toward a goal, you can achieve that. You don’t have to accept that things will always be like this. When people come together, when communities come together, you can act for change.

We’re just about to introduce our ban on strangulation in pornography, which is another thing that I’ve been campaigning for and introduced an amendment last year, which the government accepted.

There are always things that we can do to change. You just need to keep going. And also I would say that when you work with these terribly dark areas, yes, it can be quite vicariously traumatizing. But actually the people who work within the sectors are some of the most hopeful people, partly because if you lose hope, then it’s really bad. And we can’t because we’re talking about protecting vulnerable children, and we are fighting for women and our rights to be free of this harm. How to