DUBLIN – Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), acting as the lead regulator for the European Union, initiated a formal inquiry on Friday, April 11, 2025, into the use of personal data by Elon Musk’s social media platform X. The investigation focuses on the platform's utilization of publicly accessible posts from EU users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok.

The DPC’s statement specifies that the probe concerns the “processing of personal data comprised in publicly-accessible posts posted on the ‘X’ social media platform” by individuals within the European Union. The core objective of the inquiry is to ascertain whether this personal data was processed lawfully to train Grok’s Large Language Models (LLMs).

Grok represents a suite of LLMs, or generative AI models, engineered by Elon Musk. These models are accessible via his social media platform, X. The inquiry follows prior concerns raised last year when X began incorporating personal data from public posts made by European users into its AI training datasets. Ireland’s DPC subsequently launched a court case, asserting that this practice infringed upon users’ data privacy rights under EU law.

Given that X maintains its European headquarters in Ireland, the Irish Data Protection Commission assumes the role of the primary data protection regulator for the platform across the European Union. In August of the previous year, X pledged to collaborate with the DPC and agreed to temporarily suspend its utilization of EU users’ data. Consequently, the DPC dropped its legal case. However, the social media platform has continued its efforts in developing new AI models since then.

On Friday, the Irish authority declared that its inquiry would scrutinize “compliance with a range of key provisions” outlined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This includes assessing whether data has been processed with the necessary “lawfulness and transparency,” as mandated by GDPR.