Apple and Google are under mounting political pressure from Democrats over X’s AI chatbot, Grok, after lawmakers accused the platform of producing images of women and allegedly minors in bikinis.
While the outrage targets X specifically, the ability to generate such material is not unique to one platform. Similar image manipulation and synthetic content creation can be found across nearly every major AI system available today.
Yet, the letter sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey only asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.
X is used by around 557 million users.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The lawmakers wrote that “X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms.”
They pointed to Google’s developer rules, which prohibit apps that facilitate “the exploitation or abuse of children,” and Apple’s policy against apps that are “offensive” or “just plain creepy.”
Ignoring the First Amendment completely, “Apple and Google must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed,” the letter states.
Dozens of generative systems, including open-source image models that can’t be controlled or limited by anyone, can produce the same kinds of bikini images with minimal prompting.
The senators cited prior examples of Apple and Google removing apps such as ICEBlock and Red Dot under government pressure.
“Unlike Grok’s sickening content generation, these apps were not creating or hosting harmful or illegal content, and yet, based entirely on the Administration’s claims that they posed a risk to immigration enforcers, you removed them from your stores,” the letter stated.
That comparison reveals how enforcement decisions often hinge less on consistent rule application and more on the political context surrounding a particular app.
More: Starmer’s Looking for an Excuse to Ban X
If Apple and Google were to apply the same standard across their ecosystems, they would face the uncomfortable reality that many AI models, some even embedded within their own platforms, are capable of producing identical results.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, which Apple partners with for Siri (and soon will partner with Google’s AI) and Google’s own Gemini AI tool have also produced such images. But the Senators haven’t called for those apps to be banned too.
Generative systems trained on public image data can easily be manipulated into generating any material, including synthetic bikini images.
Targeting one company as a scapegoat may ease political outrage, but does little to address the structural problem that all advanced AI models can create content that crosses ethical or legal boundaries.
When app store policies are enforced in response to political attention rather than objective criteria, it strengthens the argument that digital gatekeeping is being used as a tool of control rather than a neutral system of protection.
The result is an environment where large corporations and government officials determine who gets silenced, while the underlying technological issues remain unresolved.
