The Irish privacy regulator is investigating X's use of public data to train Grok.
The country is applying EU regulations because the company is headquartered in Dublin.
Ireland's data privacy authority is conducting an investigation into platform X, led by Elon Musk. The country's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Friday that it will initiate an inquiry into how the social media network uses European users' public posts to train its Grok AI chatbot. Since X's European headquarters is located in Dublin, Ireland is responsible for enforcing EU regulations.
The DPC will investigate "the processing of personal data contained in publicly accessible posts made on the social media platform 'X' by users in the EU/EEA." Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules in Europe, Ireland has the legal authority to impose fines on X of up to four percent of its global revenue.
The aim of this investigation is to determine whether personal data was processed legally for the training of the Grok language models. This situation may seem familiar, as the DPC took X to court in 2024, seeking an order to prevent the service from using data from EU users without their consent to train Grok. This was due to a policy change on the platform in July, which allowed the use of public posts for this purpose. However, the DPC suspended the legal process weeks later, reporting that the company had agreed to permanently limit the use of EU users' personal data in Grok. Recently, the DPC has not clarified why it now considers that the company may be violating GDPR rules.
The last fine imposed on X, which at that time was known as Twitter, was 450,000 euros in 2020 for failing to notify the regulatory authority about a data breach within the 72-hour timeframe.