The post Grok market share surges amid fierce regulatory backlash over deepfakes appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI is under pressure from regulators on many continents after its chatbot Grok created AI-generated, inappropriate pictures of actual people, despite the fact that the company claims significant user growth and concludes a major merger with SpaceX. Last month, Grok flooded the X social media platform with AI-altered images of real individuals after users requested them. The episode sparked outrage worldwide and triggered investigations by governments and regulators. Although X announced restrictions that stopped Grok’s own account on the platform from creating such images, Reuters confirmed earlier this month that the chatbot itself still generates them when users ask it to. Regulators in three regions open investigations The impact has spread to three major jurisdictions. The European Union opened a formal investigation against Grok after estimations revealed that it had created millions of deepfake photos in only a few days. The EU might levy substantial fines. The Japanese government has requested improvements from X and submitted written inquiries, citing concerns over the generation of inappropriate images. In the United States, California has gone one step further and issued a cease-and-desist order to xAI, ordering the business to stop producing such content. Despite the controversy, Grok’s numbers tell a different story in terms of audience growth. The chatbot’s share of the U.S. market jumped to 17.8% last month, up from 14% in December and just 1.9% in January, according to data from research firm Apptopia. That puts Grok in third place among chatbots used in the United States, behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT in first and Google Gemini in second. ChatGPT’s U.S. market share fell drastically to 52.9% last month, down from 80.9% in January of the previous year. Gemini moved in the other direction, increasing its share to 29.4% from 17.3% throughout the same time. Grok made…

---

Filed under: News - @ February 14, 2026 3:19 pm