While much attention has focused on the row between the United States and the United Kingdom over banning Grok (Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot on X), Indonesia and Malaysia had already imposed bans on the platform days earlier. These interventions appear to be establishing a regional pattern, with the Philippines becoming the third country to announce a ban on Grok. This marks an important regulatory pivot: Southeast Asian states are moving from late adopters to early movers on a highly contested frontier of AI safety, online harms, and platform governance. Indonesia’s decision on 10 January to temporarily block access to Grok marked the first instance of a state intervening directly against the platform. The move was triggered by concerns over the tool’s “digital undressing” capability, which facilitates the creation of non-consensual, sexualised nude or near-nude deepfake images, including of children. Malaysia followed within a day, imposing a similar temporary restriction after documenting repeated misuse of the system to generate obscene and manipulated content, notwithstanding prior regulatory warnings and safeguard mechanisms that depended largely on post-hoc user reporting.
What the Grok bans in Southeast Asia tell us about AI governance | Lowy Institute
