Karin Keller-Sutter, Switzerland’s finance minister and the country’s former president, has filed criminal charges for defamation and insult after Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok was prompted by an anonymous user to generate a torrent of sexist and vulgar remarks about her on X. The complaint, filed on 20 March with the Bern public prosecutor’s office, is directed against “persons unknown” because the X user who prompted Grok could not be identified beyond a screen name. It is, by all available evidence, the first time a serving head of a national finance ministry has pursued criminal action against an AI-generated statement.

The incident occurred on 10 March, when a user on X instructed Grok to “roast” a figure they described as “Federal Councillor KKS, my favourite chick,” urging the chatbot to attack her in crude street language. Grok complied. The resulting post, a barrage of misogynistic abuse attributed to the chatbot, was published on Keller-Sutter’s feed. A spokesperson for the minister told Politico that the post was not “a contribution protected by freedom of expression or part of the political debate, but rather a pure denigration of a woman.” The spokesperson added: “One must fundamentally defend oneself against such misogynistic statements.”

Keller-Sutter is no minor political figure. She heads the Federal Finance Department and is one of seven members of the Swiss Federal Council, the country’s highest executive authority. In 2025, she served as president of the Swiss Confederation, a role that rotates annually among the council members. Before entering federal politics, she studied political science in London and Montreal, served as a cantonal justice minister, and presided over the Council of States. Her decision to file criminal charges rather than simply delete the post signals an intent to test whether Swiss defamation law, which criminalises both defamation under Article 173 and slander under Article 174 of the penal code, can reach the operators of AI systems and the platforms that host them. The legal question at the heart of the complaint is whether social media companies and their operators, in addition to individual users, can be held criminally liable for content generated by their own AI tools.

That question has not been answered anywhere in the world, but courts are beginning to confront it. In the United States, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Meta in 2025 after its AI falsely linked him to the January 6 Capitol riot; Meta settled rather than litigate. A Georgia court dismissed a separate defamation case against OpenAI after ChatGPT fabricated claims about a radio host, ruling that the legal threshold for fault had not been met. No AI defamation case has reached a final judgment in any jurisdiction. Keller-Sutter’s complaint, filed under a criminal rather than civil framework and in a country whose defamation statute carries prison sentences of up to three years for deliberate slander, could establish the first binding precedent on AI platform liability for generated speech.

The filing arrives against the backdrop of what has become the most sustained regulatory crisis in Grok’s brief existence. Between 29 December 2025 and 8 January 2026, Grok’s image-generation tools created more than three million sexualised images, approximately 23,000 of which depicted minors, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. The discovery triggered a cascade of legal and regulatory actions that has not stopped. On 2 January, French ministers reported the content to prosecutors, calling it “manifestly illegal.” On 12 January, the United Kingdom’s Ofcom opened a formal investigation into whether X had complied with the Online Safety Act, with potential penalties of up to £18 million or 10 per cent of global revenue. On 14 January, California’s attorney general announced a state investigation into whether xAI had violated California law. On 26 January, the European Commission opened a probe under the Digital Services Act into whether Grok’s deployment met the platform’s legal obligations regarding illegal content and harm to minors.

The enforcement actions escalated sharply in February. On 3 February, French prosecutors, accompanied by a cybercrime unit and Europol officers, raided X’s Paris offices. The investigation, originally opened over complaints about platform operation and data extraction, had widened to include charges of complicity in distributing child sexual abuse material, creating sexually explicit deepfakes, and Holocaust denial. Prosecutors have since summoned Musk and X’s former chief executive Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews on 20 April. A Dutch court separately ordered Grok banned from generating non-consensual intimate images. The EU had already fined X €120 million in December 2025 for violating the DSA’s transparency requirements, a penalty X is now challenging in what has become the first court test of the bloc’s landmark digital regulation.

In the United States, three Tennessee teenagers filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI on 16 March, alleging that Grok had been used to create sexualised images of them without their knowledge or consent. The images were reportedly shared on Discord and other platforms. On 25 March, Baltimore became the first American city to sue xAI over Grok-generated deepfake pornography, alleging violations of consumer protection law. A separate class action, filed by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, alleges that xAI knowingly designed and profited from an image generator used to produce and distribute child sexual abuse material while refusing to implement the content-safety measures adopted by every other major AI company.

The governance vacuum at xAI compounds the legal exposure. All 11 of xAI’s original co-founders have now departed the company, including researchers recruited from Google DeepMind, Google Brain, and Microsoft Research. Musk said in March that xAI was “not built right the first time around” and needed to be rebuilt from its foundations. The company was absorbed into SpaceX in February through an all-stock merger that raised immediate governance questions, creating a combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion that is now preparing for what would be the largest initial public offering in history. The regulatory and litigation risks surrounding Grok are, in effect, now embedded in the prospectus of a company seeking a $1.75 trillion public valuation.

What makes Keller-Sutter’s complaint distinct from the deepfake and CSAM cases is its simplicity. It does not involve image generation, undressing algorithms, or child exploitation. It involves a chatbot that was asked to insult a named public official and did so in language that, under Swiss law, constitutes a criminal offence. The factual question is narrow: who is responsible when an AI system, operating on a commercial platform, generates defamatory speech at a user’s request? If the user cannot be identified, does liability pass to the platform operator, to the AI developer, or to no one at all?

The answer to that question will shape the trajectory of AI governance far beyond Switzerland. Every major AI company operates chatbots capable of producing defamatory, abusive, or factually false statements about real people. Most have implemented guardrails designed to refuse such requests. Grok, by deliberate design, has operated with fewer restrictions than its competitors, a positioning Musk has marketed as a commitment to free expression. The Keller-Sutter case tests whether that positioning can survive contact with criminal law.

Switzerland is not the European Union and is not bound by the DSA. But Swiss defamation law is among the most stringent in Europe, and a criminal finding against an AI platform operator would reverberate through every jurisdiction currently weighing similar questions. The case is small in scope, involving a single post on a single platform about a single official. But the principle it seeks to establish, that the companies building these systems bear the kind of legal responsibility that the age of AI governance demands, is anything but small. If Grok can be prompted to defame a former president with impunity, the question is not what it says about the technology. It is what it says about the law.

Photo credit: Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal recently got a rare look inside Apple Park as part of the company’s 50th anniversary celebrations, with reporters joining Tim Cook for a walk through an archive that Cook himself admitted he had barely visited until preparations for the milestone began pulling decades of stored material back into the light.

The first thing that caught his eye was Apple’s original patent filing for the Apple II, a single document that Cook said effectively opened the floodgates for what eventually became more than 140,000 patent applications. A small drawing on a piece of paper that quietly set the direction for everything that followed.

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An early 2001 iPod prototype came next, and Cook recalled the feeling of holding it for the first time a few years after joining the company. The idea of carrying a thousand songs in your pocket felt genuinely unbelievable at a moment when most people were still rotating five CD changers on road trips. He remembered loading a Beatles song the moment he got his hands on one and how that little white device changed his daily commute.

The 2007 iPhone launch remains Cook’s favorite moment in the company’s history, and a circuit board from one of the first working prototypes sitting on the table illustrated just how far the engineering team had to travel to get there. It looked more like a cutting board than something destined for a pocket, an early proof of concept that needed everything working together before the whole thing could be miniaturized. Cook noted that even inside Apple, employees were walking around with early models watching keys and coins scratch the plastic casing. Steve Jobs made the call to switch to glass within a matter of months, a timeline Cook described as close to impossible, comparing it to trying to land on the moon between January and June.

Cook touched on projects that never made it, framing each one as something the team learned from before showing up the next morning and getting back to work. That steadiness, he suggested, is what carried the company through five decades of setbacks and breakthroughs alike. An early Apple Watch prototype rounded out the tour, and Cook’s attention shifted forward, pointing to the combination of hardware, software, and services as the space where the next significant leap is most likely to come from.

The best streaming services have added plenty of new movies in April, and I was excited to see lots of horror titles among them.

April is a strong month for horror with some of the biggest franchises and originals available to watch from the comfort of your living room. The month is typically associated with pranks and comedies, but if you want something more macabre, I’ve got you covered.

SpaceX is looking to the heavens for its upcoming initial public offering based on a $1.75 trillion valuation, according to confidential paperwork filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

As reported by Bloomberg, the draft IPO registration is the first step toward a possible June offering that could raise approximately $75 billion. The filing allows the company to get feedback from the SEC before the information is released publicly.

The IPO may be open to more people than just the wealthiest investors. According to a report by The Motley Fool, SpaceX plans to allocate around 30% of the initial shares to “retail investors,” meaning individual investors. Normal retail allocation tends to be around 10% of shares.

A SpaceX representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why a SpaceX IPO is a big deal

Spaceflight is an incredibly expensive endeavor; SpaceX gets billions of dollars from the US government to launch satellites and help keep NASA’s programs running. Almost a year ago, the company set a target of launching every other day through the end of 2025 and ended up launching a record 165 orbital flights.

But SpaceX is no longer just a high-flying rocket company. Its Starlink division provides data access to homes, remote locations, airlines and direct to many mobile phones in areas where there’s no cellular coverage. It also recently acquired xAI, another of Elon Musk’s companies, and owns the social media site X (formerly Twitter).

It’s the AI angle that seems to be driving up the company’s valuation ahead of the IPO. The xAI all-stock acquisition valued the company and SpaceX at $1.25 trillion. This year, OpenAI and Anthropic PBC are also expected to go public.

Although those numbers are eye-popping, the company has plenty of challenges before it can get off the launchpad.

Starlink has announced a plan to send up new V3 third-generation satellites that should bring gigabit internet speeds to its network, but those won’t be ready until 2027. Getting them up requires SpaceX’s heavy-duty Spacecraft vehicle, which has had limited success in testing so far. In the meantime, its current Starlink satellites have been exploding in orbit as recently as this week.

And for xAI, the skies aren’t exactly clear despite the current fervor for all things AI. Musk announced in mid-March that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” And the company is being sued by three teen girls and their guardians for “devastating” harm caused by its Grok AI generating child sexual abuse images.

WhatsApp has notified approximately 200 users, primarily in Italy, that they were tricked into installing a counterfeit version of the messaging app that was actually government spyware. The fake application was built by SIO, an Italian surveillance technology company that develops spyware for law enforcement and intelligence agencies through its subsidiary ASIGINT. WhatsApp said it had proactively identified the affected users, logged them out of their accounts, warned them about the privacy risks, and urged them to delete the fake client and install the official app from a trusted source. The company told TechCrunch it also plans to send a formal legal demand to SIO to halt any malicious activity linked to the campaign.

The disclosure, first reported by Italian newspaper La Repubblica and news agency ANSA, marks the second time in little more than a year that WhatsApp has publicly named a spyware vendor operating against its users in Italy. In early 2025, WhatsApp alerted around 90 users, including journalists and pro-immigration activists, that they had been targeted by Paragon Solutions, a U.S.-Israeli surveillance firm whose flagship product, Graphite, was deployed by Italy’s domestic and foreign intelligence services. That revelation triggered a political crisis in Rome. Italy’s parliamentary intelligence oversight committee, COPASIR, confirmed the use of Graphite and found that seven Italians had been targeted. Paragon subsequently cut ties with Italy’s spy agencies after the government declined to verify whether the spyware had been used against a specific journalist, Francesco Cancellato of the news site Fanpage.

SIO’s spyware operates through a different model. The malware, identified in its own code as Spyrtacus, is embedded in fake applications designed to look like legitimate software. Researchers have found 13 different samples of Spyrtacus dating back to 2019, with the most recent from late 2024. Previous versions impersonated Android apps from Italian mobile providers TIM, Vodafone, and WINDTRE, as well as earlier fake versions of WhatsApp itself. TechCrunch first exposed SIO’s Android distribution campaign in February 2025. The latest operation, targeting iPhones, represents an expansion of the tactic to Apple’s ecosystem. Once installed, Spyrtacus can steal text messages, chat histories, and call logs, as well as record audio and video directly from the device’s microphone and camera.

The delivery mechanism is as revealing as the malware itself. In Italy, authorities routinely obtain cooperation from mobile carriers, who send phishing links to their own customers on behalf of law enforcement. The target receives what appears to be a routine update notification from their provider, directing them to install what looks like a standard WhatsApp update. The Italian justice ministry has maintained a price list and catalogue showing how authorities can compel telecom companies to send such messages, a system that effectively turns the mobile network itself into a distribution channel for state surveillance tools. The cost of renting spyware in Italy is remarkably low: as of late 2022, law enforcement could access these tools for as little as €150 per day, without the large upfront acquisition costs that typically limit deployment in other countries.

Italy’s position as a spyware hub is unusual among Western democracies. Companies including Hacking Team, Cy4Gate, RCS Lab, and Raxir have all been based in the country, drawn by a legal framework that provides a formal statutory basis for the “captatore informatico,” or computer interceptor, effectively state-sanctioned trojan software. Fabio Pietrosanti, president of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, has said that spyware is deployed more frequently in Italy than anywhere else in Europe because the low cost and permissive regulation make it accessible to a far wider range of law enforcement agencies than in neighbouring countries. The result is an ecosystem in which municipal police forces, not just national intelligence agencies, can commission surveillance operations against individuals.

WhatsApp spokesperson Margarita Franklin told TechCrunch the company could not yet confirm whether the 200 affected users included journalists or members of civil society. “Our priority has been protecting the users who may have been tricked into downloading this fake iOS app,” she said. The company did not specify whether it had referred the matter to Italian prosecutors or to any regulatory authority. Apple and SIO did not respond to requests for comment.

The legal landscape around commercial spyware has shifted substantially in the past year. In May 2025, a California jury ordered NSO Group, the Israeli maker of Pegasus, to pay WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages after finding it had enabled hacks of approximately 1,400 users through zero-click attacks. A federal judge later reduced the award to $4 million but imposed a permanent injunction barring NSO from targeting WhatsApp’s infrastructure. NSO has appealed. WhatsApp’s parent company Meta described the verdict as a landmark, and it has since expanded its legal strategy against the broader surveillance industry. The formal legal demand WhatsApp intends to send SIO follows the same pattern: use litigation and public disclosure as deterrents against companies that profit from compromising encrypted messaging platforms.

The proliferation of spyware vendors presents a challenge that extends well beyond any single platform. Apple has sent mercenary-spyware threat notifications to users in more than 150 countries since 2021, alerting individuals it believes have been individually targeted by state-sponsored attacks. In April 2025, Apple notified the Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino, one of the Paragon victims, that he had been targeted. The notification systems run by Apple and WhatsApp now represent the primary mechanism by which victims of government surveillance learn they have been compromised, a function that was once the exclusive domain of the cybersecurity industry’s specialist researchers.

The global lawful-interception market was valued at $4 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $15 billion by 2032, growing at roughly 16 per cent annually. That growth is being driven not by the Pegasus-style zero-click exploits that attract headlines, but by the kind of low-cost, phishing-based tools that SIO sells. The barrier to entry for government surveillance has dropped to the point where a local police department in a midsize Italian city can commission the same class of spyware deployment that was once the preserve of national intelligence agencies. The gap between regulatory ambition and enforcement capacity in Europe means that the legal frameworks governing these tools have not kept pace with the speed at which they are being adopted.

What makes the SIO case distinct from the Paragon scandal is the method. Paragon’s Graphite used zero-click exploits that required no action from the target. SIO’s Spyrtacus requires the target to install a fake application, a social-engineering approach that relies on trust in the carrier and familiarity with routine app updates. The fact that Italian telecoms participate in the delivery chain, sending phishing messages to their own subscribers at the state’s request, turns the mobile infrastructure itself into an instrument of surveillance. It is one thing for a government to hack a phone. It is another for the phone company to help.

WhatsApp’s decision to publicly name SIO and notify the affected users follows the broader pattern of tech platforms asserting themselves as counterweights to state surveillance in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The company is not merely patching a vulnerability. It is identifying the vendor, alerting the victims, and threatening legal action, a posture that positions a messaging app owned by Meta as a more effective check on government spyware abuse than any European regulatory body has managed to date. Whether that dynamic is reassuring or alarming depends on your view of where the responsibility for protecting citizens from their own governments should ultimately rest.

For the 200 users in Italy who received WhatsApp’s notification, the immediate question is narrower: who authorised the surveillance, and on what legal basis? The answer may never become public. Italy’s lawful-intercept framework permits the use of these tools under judicial oversight, but the oversight mechanisms have repeatedly proven inadequate to prevent abuse. The Paragon scandal demonstrated that intelligence agencies could target journalists and activists under the cover of lawful authority. The SIO case suggests the problem runs deeper, extending to less prominent vendors, cheaper tools, and a distribution model that exploits the trust citizens place in their mobile carriers. The spyware industry does not need zero-click exploits to be dangerous. It just needs a convincing notification from your phone company.

Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before the Wednesday deadline for firms to make their first disclosures.

“The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) has announced that it plans to initiate rulemaking in response to comments by various stakeholders relating to the Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Law,” the state agency posted on its website in mid-March. “Implementation and enforcement of the [law] will be suspended pending completion of the rulemaking and until final regulations are in place.”

California lawmakers first passed the measure in 2023, and it was signed into law shortly thereafter by Governor Gavin Newsom. For decades, women and people of color have received only a small share of overall startup funding relative to their representation in the US population. Lawmakers hoped putting more public scrutiny on investment decisions would help foster greater equity in the market, including for people who are disabled, retired military, or LGBTQ+.

The law called for venture capital and some other investment firms to file annual reports starting March 1 of last year about the overall makeup of the founding teams they had invested in and the amount of money they provided to diverse founders. Firms were meant to collect the demographic data through a voluntary survey that was then anonymized. California authorities planned to publish the filings online. Lawmakers amended the law in 2024 to delay reporting until April 1, 2026 and enable the state to levy daily fines for noncompliance.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the authority it used to sidestep the deadline set by lawmakers. Newsom’s office also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Financiers focused on funding entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds had supported the law. But the National Venture Capital Association, the tech investment industry’s leading trade group, opposed it. The group argued that voluntary data collection would inflate diversity statistics and that publishing inaccurate data could lead to unfair attacks on investors genuinely trying to tackle diversity issues. Over the past year, the Trump administration has defunded and attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives in both the public and private sectors, leading many businesses and organizations to pull back from them.

In February, the venture capital association wrote to Newsom asking for the reporting deadline to be pushed back again because, in its view, the state had bungled the process. California authorities didn’t publish the standardized survey founders were supposed to fill out until early this year and, at the time, they still hadn’t introduced a way for firms to register with regulators as required by the law, according to the association. “This administrative timeline creates an environment ripe for error and threatens to produce the misleading and counterproductive data we previously warned against,” association president and CEO Bobby Franklin wrote.

Last month, as the deadline for the first reports loomed, some entrepreneurs and investors began complaining on social media about the survey effort. “The latest California malarky is a requirement for venture investors to collect/report racial and gender statistics,” wrote Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of venture-backed aviation startup Boom Supersonic. “I want to live in a world where merit matters—not skin color or what you have between your legs.”

A new malware-as-a-service called CrystalRAT is being promoted on Telegram, offering remote access, data theft, keylogging, and clipboard hijacking capabilities.

The malware emerged in January with a tiered subscription model. Apart from the Telegram channel, the MaaS was also promoted on YouTube, via a dedicated marketing channel that showcased its capabilities.

Kaspersky researchers say in a report today that the malware features strong similarities to WebRAT (Salat Stealer), including the same panel design, Go-based code, and a similar bot-based sales system.

CrystalX also includes an extensive list of prankware features designed to annoy the user or disrupt their work. Despite its “fun” side, CrystalX offers a large set of data theft capabilities.

CrystalX RAT details

Kaspersky says that the malware provides a user-friendly control panel and an automated builder tool that supports customization options, including geoblocking, executable customization, and anti-analysis features (anti-debugging, VM detection, proxy detection, etc.).

The generated payloads are zlib-compressed and encrypted with the ChaCha20 symmetric stream cipher for protection.

The malware connects to the command-and-control (C2) via WebSocket and sends info about the host for profiling and infection tracking.

CrystalX’s infostealer component, which Kaspersky found to be temporarily disabled as it is being prepared for an upgrade, targets Chromium-based browsers via the ChromeElevator tool, Yandex, and Opera. Additionally, the tool collects data from desktop apps such as Steam, Discord, and Telegram.

The remote access module can be used to execute commands via CMD, upload/download files, browse the file system, and control the machine in real time via built-in VNC.

The malware also exhibits spyware-like behavior, as it can capture video and audio from the microphone.

Finally, CrystalX features a keylogger that streams keystrokes in real time to the C2, and a clipper tool that uses regular expressions to detect wallet addresses in the clipboard and replace them with ones the attacker provides.

Putting some “fun” in the package

What sets CrystalX apart in the crowded MaaS space is its rich set of prankware features.

According to Kaspersky, the malware can do the following on infected devices:

• change desktop wallpaper
• alter display orientation to various angles
• force system shutdown
• remap mouse buttons
• disable input devices (keyboard/mouse/monitor)
• show fake notifications
• change cursor position on the screen
• hide various components (desktop icons, taskbar, the Task Manager, and the Command Prompt executable)
• Provide attacker-victim chat window

While the above features do not improve the attack’s monetization potential for cybercriminals, they certainly make the product distinctive, and could bait script kiddies and low-skilled/entry-level threat actors into getting a subscription.

Another reason for the prank features could be potential for victim manipulation, or even distraction, while the data theft modules run in the background.

To reduce the risk of malware infections, users are advised to exercise caution when interacting with online content and avoid downloading software or media from untrusted or unofficial sources.

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