Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Elon Musk should keep his UK Royal Society fellowship even though the Grok AI image generator developed by his company has generated sexualised images including of minors, the body’s new president has said.
Sir Paul Nurse told the FT the explicit pictures were “a disgrace” but the national science academy should not start “making judgments” about the “character and behaviour” of fellows, even if technology they created enabled unlawful acts.
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticise and criticise publicly — I’m fine with that,” Nurse said of Musk in an interview. “But I think it is naive, frankly, to say that we should get rid of him because he’s a bad person. I’m afraid there’s many bad people around, but they have made scientific advances.”
The 365-year-old institution was rocked in 2025 after two fellows quit in protest over Musk’s continued membership and other scientists inside and outside the academy condemned the tech billionaire’s behaviour.
The complaints included that he spread misinformation and bore responsibility for steep cuts to US scientific research institutions by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk left Doge in May last year.
The society held an extraordinary meeting of fellows in March but decided to take no disciplinary action against Musk, who was elected a fellow in 2018. It argued that judgments potentially seen as political would do “more harm than good”.
The academy’s code of conduct states that fellows must “strive to uphold the reputation of the society” and heed that remarks made in a personal capacity could still affect it.
Nurse, then the society’s president-elect, wrote to Musk as part of the response to the concerns. Nurse said he suggested to Musk that he resign his fellowship, but received no reply.
Musk has prompted fresh criticism over the images produced by xAI’s chatbot tool Grok in response to user instructions. Lawmakers in the UK, EU and France have threatened his social media platform X, where the images are posted, with fines and bans.
On Friday access to Grok’s image generation function was limited to paid subscribers, though Downing Street said the change “simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service”.
Contacted for comment, xAI responded: “Legacy media lies.” The company has said it has taken down illegal AI-generated images of children.
On January 3, Musk posted on X that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”.
Nurse, who was previously the Royal Society’s president between 2010 and 2015, said the institution should only expel fellows if their science proved “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective”.
“You see there Isaac Newton, behind you?” he said, gesturing to a portrait in his office of the eminent mathematician, who was Royal Society president for 24 years during the early 18th century. “He was a very nasty piece of work, yet we revere him.”
The society was not a “dining club” or “political party”, Nurse said, noting that he was sure it had included “murderers” and other criminals in the past.
Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, warned separately that the Trump administration’s attacks on US science were likely to drive researchers from other countries towards more collaboration with Chinese counterparts.
The US funding cuts and ideologically driven shutdowns of areas of investigation related to climate, vaccines and health inequalities were a “disaster for them”, he said.
“I think there will be a shift,” added Nurse, who is due to hold meetings in China next week in an effort to encourage collaboration with the country’s scientists and build trust between individuals and institutions. “The US is turning in on itself, and that will damage it . . . definitely it will feed back negatively.”
Areas for potential joint work between the UK and China included climate and agriculture, which would lead to published research and avoid “thornier issues” of commerce and security, Nurse said.
His remarks are in line with a scaled-back inter-governmental science and technology collaboration accord signed between the UK and China in November. The deal excluded some fields named in a previous agreement in 2017, including satellites, remote sensing technology and robotics.