Elon Musk’s social media platform X has responded to the sexualised deepfake controversy by turning off the Grok AI image creation function for the vast majority of users.Helena Horton, Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman have the story here.At the Downing Street lobby briefing today, the PM’s spokesperson described this as insulting to victims of misogyny because it was so weak.He said:[Today’s move] simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service.It’s not a solution.

In fact, it’s insulting to victims of misogyny and sexual violence,What it does prove is the X can move swiftly when it wants to do so,You heard the prime minister yesterday,He was abundantly clear that X needs to act now,If another media company had billboards in town centres showing unlawful images, it would act immediately to take them down or face public backlash.

The spokesperson said that “all options” were on the table for the government as potential responses to this problem, and he said that Ofcom had the government’s “full support to take any action it sees fit”.He went on:The point here is we must stop these abhorrent images being made on Grok, and we will prioritise action that puts an end to this.As the prime minister said yesterday, it’s disgraceful, it’s disgusting and it’s not be be tolerated.Asked if the government would stop using X, the spokesperson said the priority at the moment was to stop “abhorrent, unlawful images” being produced by Grok.Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been accused of “betraying” election promises to cut council tax after several councils it controls said they planned to increase rates close to the maximum allowed,Chris Parry, the Reform UK mayoral candidate who suggested David Lammy should “go home” to the Caribbean, has apologised for his “clumsily worded” remark,(See 2,49pm,)Nations are right to consider diplomatic relations when deciding whether to “call out” potential breaches of international law, Lord Hermer, the attorney general has said, after the UK government faced criticism over its reluctance to condemn the US attack on Venezuela.

Keir Starmer will exclude financial services from negotiations on closer alignment with the EU, prompting a sigh of relief from Brexit-weary City lobbyists.For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.Courts should make the decision on whether to grant an assisted death, a top barrister has told parliament, as peers continued their line-by-line scrutiny of the controversial legislation.In its reports on today’s Lords debate on the assisted dying bill, PA Media says:A previous draft of the bill included a high court judge safeguard, but this was dropped in favour of a three-member panel featuring a social worker, psychiatrist and a legal professional.Lord Carlile of Berriew argued a court-based process would “provide confidence-inspiring judgment in this important and difficult new area of the law”.

But another leading KC, Lord Pannick, said the court backlog means this would “build in delays” for people who have less than six months to live and the decision-making panel set out in the Bill is preferable, due to the “range of expertise” it provides,Labour former minister Lord Falconer, who is shepherding the bill through the Lords, said a multi-disciplinary panel was “safer” than the proposed change,Liz Kendall, the science secretary, has said that Ofcom needs to take action to deal with X’s Grok AI sexualised deepfake imagery problem “in days, not weeks”,Reinforcing the line taken by No 10 earlier (see 12,06pm), she said that Ofcom had the government’s full support to take action that could include multi-million pound fines.

She told broadcasters:There are also powers in the Online Safety Act which enable Ofcom to block those services being made available to people in the UK.And as I said, we would want to ensure Ofcom uses the full range of powers that it has.But we as a government are taking additional action because we are determined to ensure women and girls are as safe online as we want them to be safe in the real world.No ifs, no buts.Kendall said the government and the public “will expect to see next steps from Ofcom in days, not weeks”.

There will be “more progress” soon on separate government plans to criminalise the creation of intimate images without consent and ban nudification apps, she added,The Liberal Democrats have written to the National Crime Agency urging it to investigate X over the production of sexualised deepfake images by its Grok AI tool,The letter has been sent by Victoria Collins, the Lib Dems’ science spokesperson,In it, she says:While Ofcom has expressed serious concerns and is examining the platform’s compliance with the Online Safety Act, this situation is not being treated with anything like the seriousness it demands,This goes well beyond a regulatory failure: harmful criminal offences are being committed by British individuals, and a corporate entity appears to be facilitating them while refusing to take effective steps to prevent them.

These matters fall squarely within the remit of the National Crime Agency,The safety of women and children online must be treated with the utmost seriousness,The continued availability of AI tools that can be used to generate sexual abuse imagery represents a clear and present risk to the public,I therefore urge the NCA to investigate X and its UK operations, assess whether criminal offences have been committed, and take appropriate enforcement action, including against individuals responsible for generating and sharing illegal content,The Internet Watch Foundation, which works to remove child sex abuse imagery online, has joined No 10 in saying that X’s response to the sexualised deepfake scandal is inadquate.

(See 12.06pm.)Hannah Swirsky, head of policy at the IWF, said:This move [by X] does not undo the harm which has been done.We do not believe it is good enough to simply limit access to a tool which should never have had the capacity to create the kind of imagery we have seen in recent days.Companies must make sure the products they build and make available to the global public are safe by design.

Here is our latest story on this by Peter Walker, Alexandra Topping and Kiran Stacey.The Liberal Democrats have urged Reform UK MPs who receive payment from X for their posts to donate the money to charities working to combat sexual exploitation, after the site was flooded with AI-generated sexualised images of women and children.Peter Walker has the story.Jamie Grierson is a senior Guardian reporter.A Reform UK mayoral candidate who suggested David Lammy should “go home” to the Caribbean has apologised for his “clumsily worded” remark.

Chris Parry suggested that is where the deputy prime minister’s “loyalty lies” in a tweet which came to light at the end of last year.The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said this week that the retired naval officer should apologise for the “over the top” comments.Parry said in a statement that his “ironic comment” related to Lammy’s “vehement advocacy for reparations” from the UK.He later defended his original post, from February 2025, saying: “Well, home is where the heart is.That’s the point.

”Parry, from Portsmouth, is the Reform candidate for the Hampshire and the Solent mayoralty,Lammy, who is also the Justice Secretary, was born in London to Guyanese parents,Parry said:Recalling Mr Lammy’s longstanding self-identification as a Caribbean person, I tweeted ironically and probably too casually, that he should therefore ‘go home to the Caribbean where loyalty lies’,It reflected that I believed that it was inappropriate and unpatriotic for the British-born foreign secretary of the United Kingdom to be promoting the interests of countries other than the one in which he held one of the great offices of state,The tweet’s timing and wording also related to the fact that he had recently been to Guyana and the Caribbean on official business.

Although I might not agree with his political beliefs, I recognise Mr Lammy’s long career in public service, currently as deputy prime minister.It is unfortunate that much more was read into a clumsily worded, nine-month-old tweet than was intended, and I apologise for any distress or offence that it caused.The Labour party said the mayoral candidate should still be removed from the party.Although Keir Starmer, and other European leaders, have pushed back with modest firmness against Donald Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland, the US president’s sabre-rattling has clearly had some impact on Nato allies.Yesterday Starmer spoke by phone to his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen (“Both leaders agreed on the importance of deterring Russian aggression in the High North and that Nato should step up in the area to protect Euro-Atlantic interests,” No 10 said), to the Nato secretary general Mark Rutte (“They agreed that more needed to be done to deter Russia in the High North and welcomed discussions on how allies could further protect the region from increasing Russian threats”), and to Donald Trump (“The leaders discussed Euro-Atlantic security and agreed on the need to deter an increasingly aggressive Russia in the High North”).

And today there has been a further call covering this topic,Starmer has held a joint call with his two most important European allies, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, and the talk about beefing up Nato security around Greenland has continued,In its readout, No 10 said:The leaders began by reflecting on the strong unity in support of Ukraine at Tuesday’s meeting, and the good progress made on next steps,They welcomed the ongoing close coordination with the US to secure a just and lasting peace for Ukraine,Russia’s ongoing attacks in Ukraine, including of the use of an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in western Ukraine this morning, were escalatory and unacceptable, the leaders agreed.

It was clear Russia was using fabricated allegations to justify the attack, the prime minister added.The leaders then turned to security in the high north.The prime minister said the Nato alliance needed to step up in the region to deter adversaries such as Russia.Turning to the situation in Iran, the leaders agreed on the need for close coordination as events evolved and the prime minister reiterated his support for those who exercised their right to peaceful protest.The leaders looked forward to speaking again soon.

High north may sound like something from Game of Thrones, but it is a term used a lot in military circles to describe the Arctic region,Here is an MoD policy paper about it,What is not clear, though, is whether Trump’s obsession with Greenland is really related to security (in which case extra Nato measures might assuage his concerns), or whether it is really about mineral resources and territory,Anne Applebaum, the historian, journalist and dictator expert, recently said the Danes think that, for Trump, it is just about making the US bigger,A year ago, I went to Copenhagen to write about the political crisis Trump had created over Greenland.

Danes told me that because the US can already do whatever it wants on the island, they had come to a conclusion: Trump just wants the US to look bigger on a mapAsked to respond to what No 10 said about the company this morning (see 12.06pm), a spokesperson for X said they had nothing to add to this statement released earlier this week.We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.For more information on our policies, please refer to our help pages for our full X Rules and range of enforcement options.

Sinn Féin has joined those saying X should stop its Grok AI tool allowing the creation of sexualised content,In a statement, Emma Sheerin, a Sinn Féin member of the Northern Ireland assembly, said:The use of artificial intelligence on X to create and distribute sexual content, including deep fakes and nudification is deeply concerning … This functionality must be disabled on all accounts and all content removed from the platform urgently,Sinn Féin will be engaging with the [Northern Irish] department of justice on legislation within the justice bill to criminalise the creation of sexually explicit non-consensual deepfakes,It is important this legislation is fit for purpose, sanctions perpetrators, and protects people from falling victim to deepfakes,At the lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson did not deny the reports saying Keir Starmer has been told there is a £28bn shortfall in defence spending plans.

(See 9,42am,) Asked about the stories, the PM’s spokesperson said that he “wouldn’t get into specific meetings” but he said the government had ordered the biggest increase in defence spending since the cold war because of the threats facing the UK,Asked again about the report saying Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defence staff, told the PM last year that the defence budget faced a £28bn shortfall by 2030, the spokesperson did not not confirm the figure,But he said it was Knighton’s job “to provide military advice to the defence secretary and to the prime minister, which he does on a regular basis”.