A woman identified as Jane Doe 4 has joined a lawsuit filed by three Tennessee teenagers against Elon Musk’s xAI over the role the company’s chatbot Grok allegedly played in creating child sexual abuse material.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the woman alleged that her stepfather used Grok to manipulate a photo taken when she was 11 years old to create more than 7,000 explicit images of her. The woman also said that her stepfather was found dead of suicide two days after the images were uncovered in a law enforcement raid.

“Limitless access to these tools is spreading so quickly,” said the woman. “It is taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse.”

The teenagers who’d filed lawsuit accused xAI (now part of SpaceX) of failing to take basic precautions to prevent Grok from being used to create explicit images of real people, including minors. (X was flooded with millions of Grok-generated sexualized images earlier this year.) They are seeking class action status for their suit.

TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for comment.

If you are in a crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Anthropic published a blog post Friday seeking to answer some basic questions about how it will watermark the text generated by its chatbot Claude. Such as: How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code?

Claude users have been debating the move since the company revealed earlier this week that it would be doing this watermarking to comply with the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which requires AI companies to use systems that make it possible to identify AI-generated content.

On Reddit, for example, one poster characterized this as a conspiracy against innocent Claude users, while another claimed, “The only reason you wouldn’t want this is to lie to people.” And Business Insider reports that “dozens” of users on X have claimed to cancel their Claude subscriptions as a result.

Anthropic’s new post starts with a general overview of the watermarking concept, explaining that when making “low-stakes choices” — like choosing between the words “overcast” and “grey” to describe the weather — Claude can create a pattern in its responses that is “undetectable to the reader, but is detectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it.”

“Watermarking does not impact the quality of Claude’s output,” the company said. “To a reader, a watermarked response is indistinguishable from an unwatermarked one.”

More specifically, Anthropic said it will be using the SynthID-Text approach that the Google DeepMind team outlined in 2024, and that it plans to release a watermark detection API. It also noted that watermarking is distinct from the AI detection approaches offered by companies like Pangram that look for “tells” in the writing (like the construction “his isn’t [X], it’s [Y]”) to reveal AI usage: “Picking up on these patterns is fundamentally different from checking for a watermark.”

Could someone just rewrite the text to hide the watermark? Anthropic said it’s possible, but “light editing probably won’t remove the watermark completely,” while “a complete rewrite where every word is replaced will.”

“In the latter case, of course, it’s arguable whether the text can any longer be described as AI-generated,” the company said.

As for whether the watermark will be detectable in text that was only proofread or edited by Claude, Anthropic said that will depend on “the length of the text and how heavily Claude has edited it.” If it’s only been lightly edited, “nearly all the words” will have been written by the human author and “there’s very little (if anything) for the watermark to attach to.”

Code, meanwhile, should have less of a watermark than other text, because the model will need to create working code and won’t have the freedom to choose between a variety of equally valid options. 

“Having said that, in areas where there is an arbitrary choice between particular words or terms within the code, the watermark can be used, such as comments within code,” Anthropic said. “But by definition, it will have a negligible effect on the actual code produced.”

Anthropic also said that Claude won’t be the only AI chatbot to generate watermarked text, as “other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.”

Chinese memory giant CXMT has overtaken Tencent Holdings as the most valuable public company in China, underlining the speculative frenzy around memory companies at the moment.

The chipmaker debuted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on July 27, and its shares surged 467 percent on their first day of trading. CXMT’s market capitalization later reached $524 billion, according to Bloomberg.

CXMT’s market capitalization reached approximately $524 billion 17 days after its IPO, surpassing Tencent’s roughly $511 billion valuation. The crossover came as CXMT remained near its post-IPO valuation and Tencent shares declined following a sharp increase in the company’s AI infrastructure spending.

Strategically important position in China

While CXMT is the fourth largest memory manufacturer worldwide, it holds a strategically important position as the only one of the top four based in China. Foreign semiconductor and memory manufacturers are still able to do business in the country, but the escalating trade war between the US and China has forced some to limit sales of their most advanced chips, while others have been restricted by the Chinese government in favor of homegrown manufacturers.

In the event of China or the US imposing further restrictions on foreign memory chipmakers, CXMT would become the largest domestic supplier, with a near-monopoly position in China’s DRAM market, which supplies AI data centers and smartphones.

It is not just Chinese companies interested in CXMT either, with Apple reportedly testing the company’s DRAM for its MacBook and iPhone lines. Apple has, like the rest of the industry, suffered from the memory supply crunch, which has forced the iPhone maker to increase the prices of almost all of its hardware.

According to Counterpoint Research, Samsung is the leading manufacturer of DRAM with 39 percent market share, followed by SK Hynix and Micron with 29 percent and 25 percent, respectively. CXMT has seen its market share increase over the past few years, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of the total.

More must-read AI coverage

Data centers insatiable appetite for memory chips

Huge demand for memory chips has sent the stock prices of the major DRAM suppliers through the roof. SK Hynix, which was valued at $135 billion this time 12 months ago, surpassed a $1 trillion market cap in May, a huge increase for a company focused primarily on memory. Even Samsung, better known for its smartphones and TVs, is now seeing the majority of its revenue come from its memory chip and foundry businesses.

Data centers, especially those linked to AI training and operations, have a seemingly insatiable appetite for these chips, reshaping the entire consumer electronics market. Smartphone manufacturers, which were among memory chipmakers’ biggest customers a few years ago, are now struggling to secure favorable contracts for memory.

This has also affected the video gaming market, with Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve all having to either increase the price of their consoles or delay the launch of newer hardware. As AI infrastructure absorbs an ever-larger share of global memory supply, consumers are increasingly feeling the impact through higher prices and delayed product launches.

Read more: CXMT’s Shanghai IPO sent its market value soaring as investors backed China’s growing role in the AI memory-chip market.