DUBLIN – 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 percent 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.
READ MORE: Social media users lack control over data used by AI, US FTC says
US President Donald Trump and other members of his administration have criticized EU regulation of US companies and described fines imposed on US 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.
ALSO READ: Musk's AI company buys his social media firm X at $33b
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.
READ MORE: LinkedIn sued for disclosing customer information to train AI models
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.
