The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is suing X. It is all about concerns about how public posts of Europeans on the social network are used to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools, Engadget writes.

According to the Irish broadcaster RTE, the Commission has launched proceedings in the High Court against Twitter International.

The data protection watchdog is particularly concerned that European users’ data is being used to train the next version of Grok, which Elon Musk says will be released soon.

In July 2024, X implemented a change that automatically activated the setting for all users, allowing the website to use their public posts on the platform to further train its AI chatbot.

The Commission told TechCrunch that it was surprised by X’s decision, as it had been in contact with the company for several months.

Since at least May, X has had a help page that informs users how to opt out of having their data used for AI training, but it hasn’t told them that it enables access to people’s data by default.

The DPC acknowledged that X had given people the opportunity to opt out of having their data used. However, the Commission believes that this is not enough.

According to the Commission, X’s use of people’s data to train Grok violates the company’s obligations under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The commission added that the failure to offer users a timely opt-out mechanism also violates the GDPR.

As TechCrunch notes, there must be at least one legal basis for lawfully processing a European user’s data under the GDPR. But the DPC does not believe that Company X has a legal basis for its actions.

Twitter International, the Irish division of X, also refused to stop processing user data and postpone the launch of the next version of Grok, as demanded by the commission.

The DPC decided to ask the court to suspend or completely ban the company from training any artificial intelligence system on X’s user data.

If the court finds that X has indeed violated the GDPR rules, the company may be fined up to 4% of its annual global turnover.