DUBLIN (Reuters) – Ireland’s data regulator on Friday said it had opened an investigation into social media platform X over the use of personal data collected from European Union users to train its AI system Grok.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the lead EU regulator for X due to the location of its EU operations in the country. It has the power to impose fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue under the EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The inquiry will look at “the processing of personal data comprised in publicly-accessible posts posted on the X social media platform by EU/EEA users, for the purposes of training generative artificial intelligence models,” the DPC said in a statement.
U.S. President Donald Trump and other members of his administration have criticised EU regulation of U.S. companies and described fines imposed on U.S. tech companies by the EU as a form of taxation.
X owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a top adviser to Trump, has also railed against EU regulations, mainly those imposed directly by Brussels on online content.
The decision follows a court case last year in which the Irish regulator sought an order to restrict X from processing the data of EU users for the purposes of developing its AI systems.
X agreed to stop training its AI systems using personal data collected from EU users before they had the option to withdraw their consent. The Irish regulator ended its court proceedings weeks later, saying X had agreed the limits on a permanent basis.
The powerful Irish privacy regulator has fined the likes of Microsoft’s LinkedIn, TikTok and Meta since it was given sanctioning powers in 2018. Its fines to date of Meta total almost 3 billion euros.
X, or Twitter as it was then called, has not faced sanctions since the DPC fined it 450,000 euros ($511,000) in 2020, the first penalty the regulator handed out under the new data privacy system.
($1 = 0.8808 euros)
(Writing by Conor Humphries; Editing by Catarina Demony)