The state-led crackdown on Grok and xAI has begun

But how does one decide what constitutes a piece of content – ​​or whether something is considered pornographic or not?

“It’s mostly an algorithmic question in terms of ‘Does the law apply,'” Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, previously told WIRED.

Cooper, who sponsored Arizona’s age verification law, tells WIRED he stuck with the one-third threshold because the U.S. Supreme Court had previously upheld it. He says he’s heard estimates that 15 to 25 percent of accounts on X did not respond to questions about what proportion of the platform it considers pornographic.

“I don’t think you should have a minimum. It should be: Do you have porn on your site? OK. I’m not saying you have to age verify your entire site, but for any porn, you should age verify,” Cooper says. Posts on expected Users upload restricted content to mark it as explicit themselves. WIRED was unable to find similar restrictions for pornographic links on Grok’s website.

In the Arizona case, individuals would need to file a complaint — for example, if their child was harmed by pornographic material on X — and the court would then have to make X prove that less than a third of its content is pornographic, Cooper says.

Dave Moorman, the Nebraska state senator who led age verification legislation there, tells WIRED he’s not sure Grok’s site is independent but that “X doesn’t have at least a third of its content that is sexually inappropriate or harmful to minors.” However, when asked if the state had measured that, he said it had not, and he was not aware of any state that had.

“While I would of course prefer a system in which every potential piece of pornographic content is behind an age gate, passing legislation to do so without affecting the valid free speech rights of social media sites seems logistically impossible,” he says. “While I don’t know if there is a legislative solution to removing pornography from social media sites like X, I hope the company takes action.”

Pornhub, one of the world’s largest porn sites, has banned it from most countries that do age verification, arguing that there are too many non-compliant sites and that people don’t want to give their identity and personal information to a third-party site to verify their age. I will too Banned itself for new users in the UK Next week due to the country’s age verification laws, which began last July.

On Tuesday, Solomon Friedman, vice president of compliance at private equity firm Ethical Partners Capital (ECP), which owns Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, told WIRED that the methodology and scope of age verification legislation is “fatally flawed.”

Google Images, for example, has “thumbnails of every hidden pornographic image available on the Internet,” he said. Friedman and Pornhub want Google, Apple and Microsoft to enable device-based age verification so people’s data can remain stored on their phones or laptops.

“This is also the solution for adult content on ‘non-porn’ sites and platforms. It can be used to filter out explicit tweets or posts on X or explicit use of AI-powered chatbots.”

WIRED has reached out to Google, Microsoft, and Apple about whether they would be open to device-based age verification but has not yet received a response.