Police raided the headquarters of Elon Musk in Paris over his social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a criminal investigation into alleged child sexual abuse material and sexually explicit “deepfakes” generated by the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.
The Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit conducted the search with support from Europol and French police. Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino have been summoned to appear for questioning in Paris on April 20, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office. Several X employees have also been ordered to testify as witnesses.
“Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
The investigation was launched in January 2025 following complaints from French lawmakers about how X’s algorithm recommends content to users and gathers data.
The probe has since expanded to examine allegations of complicity in possessing and spreading child pornography, sexually explicit deepfakes, Holocaust denial, and manipulation of automated data processing systems as part of an organized group.
French lawmaker Eric Bothorel, who filed one of the original complaints, said that “no one is above the law” in France.
The investigation intensified after Musk’s Grok chatbot generated posts that denied the Holocaust and spread sexually explicit deepfakes. Holocaust denial is a crime in France. Grok wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” rather than for mass murder. The chatbot later acknowledged its reply was wrong and pointed to historical evidence that Zyklon B was used to kill more than 1 million people at Auschwitz.
X has dismissed the French investigation and similar probes by European Union and British authorities as politically motivated attacks on free speech.
In July, X’s global government affairs account called the French investigation “politically motivated” and said the company “categorically denies” the allegations of algorithm manipulation and fraudulent data extraction.
Musk has not publicly commented on the raid. It remains unclear what, if any, legal powers French prosecutors have to make Musk appear for questioning.