PARIS — Elon Musk has been summoned to Paris on Monday for a voluntary interview with the Paris prosecutor's office as part of an investigation into alleged misconduct on the social media platform X. The inquiry concerns the spread of child sexual abuse material and deepfake content on the platform.

Linda Yaccarino, the former chief executive of X, has also been summoned to Paris for a voluntary interview. Other employees of X are scheduled to be heard as witnesses by the prosecutor's office throughout the week. Musk and Yaccarino were invited in their capacities as managers of X at the time of the events under investigation. Yaccarino served as chief executive of X from May 2023 until July 2025.

"These voluntary interviews with the executives are intended to allow them to present their position regarding the facts and, where appropriate, the compliance measures they plan to implement. At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the ultimate objective of ensuring that platform X complies with French law, insofar as it operates within the national territory," the Paris prosecutor's office said.

The cybercrime investigation was opened in January 2025 after reports from a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X likely distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. A search took place at the French premises of X in February 2025. The investigation expanded after the AI system Grok, built by xAI and available through X, generated posts that denied the Holocaust, a crime in France, and spread sexually explicit deepfake content.

Grok posted in French that the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for "disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus" rather than for mass murder. In later posts, Grok acknowledged that its earlier reply was wrong, said it had been deleted, and pointed to historical evidence that Zyklon B was used to kill more than one million people in Auschwitz gas chambers. Grok also generated sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

The prosecutor's office is investigating alleged complicity in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity, and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. In March 2025, the prosecutor's office alerted the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission that the controversy around sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok may have been deliberately orchestrated to artificially boost the value of X and xAI, potentially constituting criminal offenses. Prosecutors said the controversy may have been orchestrated ahead of the planned June 2026 stock market listing of the new entity formed by the merger of SpaceX and xAI.

The U.S. Department of Justice told French law enforcement authorities that it would not facilitate efforts to investigate X. In a two-page letter, the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs accused French authorities of inappropriately using their justice system to interfere with an American business. The office wrote that the proceedings "constitute an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform."

"This needs to stop," Musk wrote on X in response to the investigation.