As new artificial intelligence data centers are popping up across the Wyoming, promising to bring jobs and benefits for residents, a lawsuit filed against a number of tech companies details how one Wyoming woman allegedly experienced firsthand the danger the exploding AI industry can pose.
The class action lawsuit filed in July names xAI and several other tech companies as defendants and includes the Wyoming woman as one of five Jane Doe plaintiffs.
According to the lawsuit, the Wyoming Jane Doe's stepfather uploaded a childhood photo of her to Grok — the AI platform owned by Elon Musk's xAI — in February, then prompted the platform's AI image generator to create 7,000 pornographic images depicting his stepdaughter at age 11.
The complaint goes on to graphically describe how the Wyoming Jane Doe was depicted in violent and sexual positions, often with older men, in the AI-generated images.
One of those images allegedly included a text caption reading, “Stepdad rapes her.”
“In the thousands of the sexually explicit images Grok generated, Jane Doe 4’s 11-year-old facial features are visible and identifiable,” the lawsuit states.
Alleged Obstruction
Grok is no stranger to controversy.
Over the past year, the chatbot has posted comments on X, where it is a built-in feature, praising Adolf Hitler and spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, and has complied with user requests to digitally alter photos of other X users, including children, into sexualized or nude images, drawing backlash and prompting investigations in multiple countries.
The lawsuit alleges that the Wyoming woman's stepfather specifically used Grok because it's “less restrictive than other AI models and responded to his prompts to generate sexually explicit material using an image depicting a prepubescent minor.”
After generating thousands of images, the lawsuit claims that the stepfather prompted Grok to create an image of the Wyoming Jane Doe being gang-raped, which triggered xAI to send a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
“Over the next two weeks, law enforcement officers working with the Wyoming (Internet Crimes Against Children Unit) mobilized to search for the victim and identify the perpetrator,” according to the lawsuit. “xAI obstructed this investigation at every turn.”
The lead investigator with Wyoming ICAC requested the IP address of the user who prompted the image, which xAI allegedly refused to provide, the lawsuit claims.
Despite the described hurdles, law enforcement tracked down the stepfather and executed a search warrant on Feb. 27, where they seized his devices and found nearly 7,000 Grok-generated pornographic images of his stepdaughter.
“Jane Doe 4’s stepfather was arrested following the search, charged with child exploitation offenses, and released on bail later that night,” the lawsuit states. “Two days later, on March 1, 2026, he shot himself.”
Ryan Cox, commander of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, told Cowboy State Daily in an email that the department will not comment on ongoing litigation.
Psychological Distress
Vanessa Baehr-Jones, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told Cowboy State Daily that the Wyoming Jane Doe, who is now an adult and works as a health care provider, is experiencing ongoing trauma.
“She’s suffered a tremendous amount of psychological distress and harm feeling like her childhood has been stolen,” Baehr-Jones said. “She’s going to feel anxious on a daily basis going forward about somebody finding these images.”
When NCMEC started tracking reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) submitted to its CyberTipline in 2023, it logged a total of 4,700 reports that year.
By 2025, that number had spiked to more than 400,000.
Baehr-Jones' California-based firm, Advocates for Survivors of Abuse, focuses on cases of sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking.
She spent years prosecuting those crimes as a federal prosecutor before opening the firm, and said the justice system was already stretched thin handling sex crimes even before AI entered the picture. Now the technology is pushing an already overloaded system toward unmanageable.
“This isn’t a new problem,” Baehr-Jones said. “I think it’s gotten even worse. What’s also really sad about it is that the court understanding of this is lagging behind.”
She pointed to the recent federal appeals court ruling where a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge found the First Amendment protects private possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, so long as it doesn't depict a real child.
“It’s absolutely a problem for prosecutors, because they’re stuck spending all their resources trying to find out if these are real children or not,” Baehr-Jones said. “It’s a real problem for law enforcement, prosecutors and society as a whole.”
Nothing About It Is OK
Though Wyoming falls under the 10th Circuit and isn't directly bound by the ruling, Terri Markham, co-founder and executive director of Uprising, a Wyoming nonprofit working to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation, said she worries that the ruling is a step toward creating a permission structure for more child exploitation online.
“It feels like opening Pandora's box,” Markham said. “We shouldn't even open the door to those kinds of conversations. Nothing that is a child, or in the likeness of a child, is OK.”
Even content that isn’t prompted using a specific child’s likeness is still pulling from the real images of a child, Baehr-Jones said, as that’s how large language models work.
She also emphasized how the new frontier of AI-generated CSAM is not only overwhelming the justice system, it’s also creating countless numbers of victims.
“It’s going to harm not just the victims out there who know about it, but those who may never find out,” Baehr-Jones said. “But it’ll still be a harm. These could be disseminated within someone’s community.”
Threats To Youth
For Markham, whose work involves visiting schools to educate children and teens about online safety, that type of dissemination is a major concern.
She pointed to a 2025 case in Saratoga, where a teenage boy took his own life after being threatened with the release of a nude photo he had shared with someone he was talking to online.
Markham said that tragedy happened even though the teen knew the photo existed and had shared it himself in the moment, believing he was talking with someone he trusted.
Now, she fears that same nightmare could play out for kids who never take or send photos and have no idea a pornographic image bearing their faces even exist until it's already spreading among their peers.
“There's that risk of really adverse mental health outcomes for particularly youth who don't have that fully developed brain yet,” Markham said. “Everything for someone young can feel so dire.”
The new frontier of AI-generated images, Markham said, also creates a new threat with many of the cases she sees in Wyoming, which oftentimes begin on social media with a predator creating a fake profile portraying themselves as a teen to lure potential victims.
In years past, creating that profile took time and effort, but AI has collapsed the operation dramatically, she said.
"What used to be a time-consuming process, now they can do in seconds,” Markham said. “They can learn all about you in seconds with AI. They can create fake pictures.”
As AI development moves ahead at full speed, with Wyoming positioning itself to power much of that growth through its data centers, Markham said the technology can't be left to regulate itself.
She believes real protections for kids will only come through legislation, an issue she said she’s brought to local elected leaders.
She sees some signs of progress, pointing to the Kids Online Safety Act, which both of Wyoming's U.S. senators have cosponsored, but still fears that legislation can’t keep up with technology.
‘Nothing New’
Ken Hanson, an assistant professor of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Wyoming who studies emergent technology's role in sexuality, from dating apps to AI companion chatbots, said hesitations like Markham's aren't unique to this moment.
"Fear over sex and technology is nothing new," Hanson said. "Every time there's a new thing, there's renewed concern over what's going on, and children become a focal point in these discussions.”
Whenever a new technology that can be used for sexual purposes is introduced, Hanson said there's always a claim that it's causing a spike in predatory use.
Whether those claims are backed up by data is trickier to pin down, he added.
What stands out to him about the xAI lawsuit involving the Wyoming plaintiff is how closely the alleged abuse fits a well-established pattern of child abuse typically perpetrated by someone known to the victim.
“The technology enables people to do things in new ways, but the risk factors are still very much the same,” Hanson said. “We need to be making people more aware of the fact that child sexual abuse is not this dark, scary thing far away from us, but actually often much closer to home.”
As Wyoming works to attract data centers, exempting them from sales tax on equipment purchases since 2010 and signing an executive order this June meant to streamline development, the University of Wyoming has pursued its own aggressive AI push, launching a School of Computing in 2022 and securing $8.75 million for a university-wide AI initiative.
It's a pattern Hanson said is playing out in multiple places across the country.
“I think we're seeing a lot of places are doing that,” Hanson said. “They want to be seen as leading the charge in AI technology, and often ethics is just given a little nod.”
Hanson has seen firsthand that the interest in the emerging technology isn't just institutional. He said his students, who express a mix of positive and negative stances on AI, are eager to engage critically with what it means for their own lives.
For Hanson, that tension between innovation and oversight isn't a reason to reject the technology altogether, but a call to keep sight of who it actually affects.
"We don't need to be anti-technological process, but we need to center people in this story,” Hanson said. “There are people that are going to lose jobs, have already lost jobs.
"There’s people that are going to be victimized, and I think that extends into sexual content as well."
