Hard Fork

Grok’s Undressing Scandal + Claude Code Capers + Casey Busts a Reddit Hoax

with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton
9 Jan 2026 13 min read 1h 25m
TL;DR

X's Grok is publicly generating non-consensual sexual images of women and children with minimal safeguards, shifting from accidental abuse to apparent engagement strategy while regulators worldwide demand action. Meanwhile, Claude Code has reached a tipping point where AI agents can now complete in hours what professional teams took months to build, marking a fundamental shift in who can code.

Key Moments
Kevin Roose
“X is in a lot of trouble because of the way that its Grock chatbot has been generating images of celebrities, women, children that are highly sexual and for the most part has been declining to remove them or even really comment on what has been going on.”
Opening the discussion about Grok's deepfake scandal that escalated over the holiday break
▶ 0:46
Kate Conger
“someone can go online and request a nude image of their 14-year-old and that this technology will comply with it in a really public fashion.”
Describing the unprecedented public nature of AI-generated child sexual abuse material on X
▶ 11:38
Kevin Roose
“Now you have a a website that is just taking girls clothes off in public on demand and it's being permitted by the website owner who is laughing about it in his own feed and we're saying ah what are you going to do that's Elon”
Expressing incredulity at the muted public response compared to past social media controversies like Cambridge Analytica
▶ 19:50
Casey Newton
“I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. This is someone who's probably a you know top.1% programmer in the world saying this.”
Citing Andre Karpathy's reaction to Claude Code's autonomous capabilities
▶ 28:43
Casey Newton
“Something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, just the two of us sitting next to the U tide log trying to vibe code.”
Describing an intimate moment with her boyfriend after he installed Claude Code to start building together
▶ 29:48
About the show
›
Hard Fork is the New York Times' weekly podcast where tech columnist Kevin Roose and Platformer's Casey Newton dive into the week's biggest tech stories. This week they explore Grok's unchecked deepfake porn generation, Claude Code's breakthrough capabilities that have professional programmers rethinking their skills, and a Reddit scam that exposed AI-generated misinformation.
Takeaways
1
Grok's deepfakes expose Section 230's limits Unlike user-generated content, Grok itself is creating non-consensual sexual imagery—making Section 230 protections potentially inapplicable. Legal experts see this as opening a new avenue for holding X liable, though the U.S. regulatory response remains muted compared to international regulators in France, the UK, and EU.
2
X weaponizing engagement over enterprise credibility Leadership is openly celebrating the porn-generation trend as a traffic driver while simultaneously launching Grok Enterprise. The strategy appears to be maintaining separate products: a muted enterprise version for sales and a deliberately outrageous social version for engagement and dominance of discourse.
3
Claude Code signals the end of coding gatekeeping Professional engineers report AI agents completing week-long projects in hours. This isn't incremental improvement—it's a threshold moment where non-programmers can now build production-quality software, fundamentally disrupting how technical hiring and skill stratification work in tech.