ELON MUSK attracts more controversy than anyone else in the AI realm because of his propensity to approve the release of technology before it’s demonstrably safe and ready for public consumption. While Tesla has been one of his most successful companies to date, it has also attracted the most lawsuits, especially among consumers who felt that Musk overpromised and underdelivered on the concept of self-driving electric cars.
Disappointment over Tesla cars notwithstanding, Musk gained a reputation as a corporate supervillain when he did a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration last year and turned loose the DOGE hackers to attack government employment rolls, even eliminating essential jobs. A lot of their efforts have been reversed, but it was costly. DOGE hackers also stole government information about private citizens by copying government databases.
Of late Musk has been under fire for parent company xAI’s chatbot, Grok, enabling the public to “undress” anyone digitally. Over nine days after the capability became available, the chatbot generated and posted 4.4 million images. Of those, 41 percent were sexualized images of women.
Musk’s company is being sued by attorneys general of at least California and Arizona for the creation of child porn using the app. Musk responded by saying he would remove the photo-altering capability. Only AI-generated images will be allowed to be unclothed, he said. Even so, Great Britain is investigating X for creating and spreading artificially generated sexualized images of women and children.
Additionally, the mother of one of Musk's children, Ashley St. Clair, sued xAI in January 2026, alleging Grok AI created nonconsensual, explicit deepfakes of her, causing public nuisance and harm. As we go to press at least 37 state attorneys general are suing to halt the practice, eliminate the capability and remove all such images.
One of the latest shocking developments is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that Grok will be integrated into all defense databases. Doesn’t that sound like the plot of a sci-fi movie? Terminator, here we come!
Currently there is no way to stop the administration from pursuing reckless behavior, but the world wants AI regulations, and they will inevitably come. I just hope it happens before some truly catastrophic event occurs because of Musk being unbound by a responsible government.
Claude gains traction
Computer coders have known since last May, when Anthropic released Claude Code, that it’s one of the most powerful AI tools out there. You can ask it to write code for you by typing requests, and it works. It started the trend of “vibecoding,” which doesn’t require users to actually understand how to write code to generate it.
The New York Times published a story on how people who aren’t coders are using it to make their lives easier. One was an Australian man with four daughters who took photos of their clothes and input them to an AI agent so he could sort laundry better and faster by showing it each item and identifying which kid wore it. Another used it to generate website code in a day. An assistant prosecuting attorney used Claude Code and Cursor (another vibecoding app) to create a mobile app called AlertAssist to let users send mass texts to contacts in an emergency. The owner of a welding and metal-fabrication business used Claude Code to build a personal AI assistant. The possibilities for the average person are endless.
Humans& to train workers
A startup called Humans&, comprised of a top researcher from Anthropic, two from xAI and one of the first employees of Google, is working to have AI empower people rather than replace them. To do that the group is building software that makes it easier to use and tailored for specific uses, such as improving online searches, for example, hiring twenty researchers and engineers to create this more human-friendly AI agent. The company is valued at $4.48 billion and doesn’t even have a product yet. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Google Ventures and SV Angel, has invested $480 million in seed money.
Journalist Toni Denis is a partner in Seeflection Inc.
