Elon Musk's xAI excludes EU user data amid privacy concern

Elon Musk's xAI project has been forced to exclude EU user data from its dataset following a legal challenge concerning its use of public X (formerly Twitter) data to train language models. EU officials raised concerns under GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) about the consent requirements for using public data, leading to a legal challenge. The company initially argued that its usage was covered under existing permissions.

In response to the challenge, the company quietly added a new account setting allowing users to explicitly permit the use of their posts and activity to train its Grok AI chatbot. Despite initial resistance, the company has conceded that it needs to improve its approach to gaining user consent. As a result, the project has decided to exclude public posts from EU users while it works on a new strategy.

The company recently expanded its "Colossus" AI training system, which is set to make more use of public X data to enhance its AI offerings, including Grok. The exclusion of EU data could be a significant blow to Grok, the company's AI chatbot, particularly in providing up-to-date news and European insights. Grok's selling point is delivering real-time responses based on platform chatter, but it will now lose input from around 100 million EU users.

The company is likely developing a new approach to gain EU user consent, but until then, Grok and xAI’s offerings have lost considerable data. Despite the exclusion, it has seen a steady decline in usage in the EU, possibly reducing the value of EU user insight. However, 100 million users still represent a significant portion of X’s total user base. The company is expected to introduce a renewed approach to handling EU user data and consent shortly.