Norway Bans AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes

Norway's parliament has passed new legislation making it a crime to create and distribute AI-generated sexual content depicting real people without their consent. The rules explicitly cover deepfakes made with popular AI tools, including Grok on Elon Musk's X platform.

What exactly is banned

The new law criminalizes generating and sharing AI-created sexual material based on a specific person's likeness if that person has not given consent. In practice this targets what's known as nonconsensual intimate imagery, intimate content created and distributed without the consent of the person depicted, increasingly generated in seconds by free or cheap AI tools.

The rules are not limited to a single tool, but the bill's explanatory notes explicitly cite Grok, the photo-editing feature built into X. It was Grok that triggered a wave of criticism around the turn of December and January, once it became clear how widely it could be used to create unauthorized, sexualized images.

The scale of the problem, according to researchers

The UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed traffic on X after Elon Musk announced on December 29 a feature letting users edit other people's photos with a single click using Grok. Over the following 11 days, through January 8, the tool reportedly generated around 3 million photorealistic sexual images, a pace of roughly 190 images per minute.

Researchers estimated that about 23,000 of those images sexualized children, statistically one new image every 41 seconds. xAI restricted the feature to paying users on January 9 and added additional technical safeguards on January 14 to block the undressing of people in photos, though only after the wave of criticism.

Why Norway isn't waiting for Brussels

The European Union is working in parallel on similar restrictions as part of an amendment to the AI Act, pushed in part by France and Spain after the Grok controversy. Member state ambassadors have approved a draft banning AI systems that generate sexual and intimate content without the consent of the people depicted, as well as material depicting the sexual exploitation of children, but the legislative process in Brussels could still take years.

Norway, despite not being an EU member, usually adopts EU digital regulations with a delay through the European Economic Area. This time, Oslo decided to get ahead of Brussels with its own domestic law, citing the pace at which the problem is growing.

The European Union is working on AI regulations under the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, but implementation could take years. We need clear national rules now - Mirell Hoeyer-Berntsen, Norwegian MP and author of the bill

Cross-party support

The bill was backed both by the ruling center-left Labour Party and by opposition parties: the Conservatives, the Christian Democrats, the Greens and the right-wing Progress Party. Such broad, cross-party support in Norway's parliament is rare, and it shows that sexual deepfakes have stopped being an ideological dispute and become a matter of protecting victims regardless of political affiliation.

Victims of this kind of content include public figures, such as Norwegian politicians and female politicians abroad, as well as ordinary citizens whose social media photos end up in AI generators without their knowledge. It was precisely the scale of abuse against anonymous private individuals, hard to measure but felt in complaints filed with data protection authorities, that was the main argument for swift legislative action.

What this means for other countries

Norway's law is becoming a precedent for other European countries still waiting for the EU's AI Act provisions in this area to be finalized. Similar national initiatives are already being considered in several EU countries, where the Grok controversy created similar social and political pressure to act quickly, rather than wait out the slow process of negotiations at the community level.

For companies developing generative AI tools, this is a signal that rules on sexual content and deepfakes will multiply at the national level faster than at the EU level, raising the legal risk of distributing photo-editing features internationally without adequate safeguards.