State Department Prepares to Punish Another Country for Elon Musk

The U.S. Department of State is going to bat against the United Kingdom so Elon Musk can keep getting rich off of AI porn.

In an interview Tuesday, Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, threatened to fight back against the British government’s mounting efforts to combat the prevalence of sexually explicit computer-generated images on social media.

“With respect to a potential ban of X, Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table,” said Rogers, referring to the British prime minister. “I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech.”

She also stressed that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance were “huge champions” of free speech—though nothing could be further from the truth. Since entering office, both Trump and Vance have devoted countless hours to undermining the press over its unfavorable coverage of their authoritarian bumbling, and their administration has repeatedly sought to punish its critics for their speech.

The British Labour Party announced Monday that it planned to criminalize the creation of nonconsensual sexualized images, placing legal culpability not only on the creators but on the platforms supplying tools for the images’ creation, such as Musk’s X. British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said that platforms needed to take measures to become safer for women and girls. “If they do not, I am prepared to go further,” she warned.

Britain’s Office of Communications, the country’s independent regulator for communications, also announced that it had launched an investigation into X over thousands of pornographic images generated by Grok, Musk’s racist AI chatbot that recently admitted to making explicit images of infants.

The Trump administration’s effort to save Musk comes shortly after it sought help from the deposed DOGE czar to reestablish internet access in Iran, to help protesters there circumvent the government-imposed media blackout.

This isn’t the first time that the U.S. State Department has defended Musk’s financial interests. The agency reportedly pressured at least one foreign government to approve a license for Starlink, which is owned and operated by SpaceX, of which Musk owns a $150 billion stake.

While Musk’s short stint in the White House may be over, his friendship with the president is still paying dividends. It’s no secret that Musk spent his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, and used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries.