Musks X Bows To EU Data Protection Demands On Grok AI Scraping

Elon Musk's X Corp. agreed to stop processing the personal information of European users to train its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, bowing to demands from European Union regulators.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission on Wednesday announced the company's commitment to delete EU users' personal data contained in public posts on its X social-media platform that were collected between May 7 and Aug. 1, 2024.

The spat began in August, when the DPC filed a request with Ireland's High Court to stop X from processing the data for use in the company's AI model, citing EU data protection restrictions and alleging that X's action risked jeopardizing users' rights.

Ireland's data protection office serves as the chief EU regulator for X, which has its European headquarters in the country. The DPC said it was the first time a lead EU agency has taken such an action against an online platform.

Following the DPC's original notification, X agreed to temporarily suspend the use of the data to train Grok - a commitment that became permanent Wednesday, leading the DPC to conclude the court proceedings.

The DPC also asked the EU-level European Data Protection Board to kick-start a discussion on the interplay between data protection and AI model training - an issue that has in recent months given rise to disputes between data watchdogs and tech companies, including X and Meta Platforms, Inc.

"The DPC hopes that the resulting opinion will enable proactive, effective and consistent Europe-wide regulation of this area more broadly," DPC commissioner Dale Sunderland said in a news release. "It will also support the handling of a number of complaints that have been lodged with/transmitted to the DPC" about this matter.

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