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(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk accused the UK government of being “fascist” after it stepped up threats to block X over sexualized images of women and children produced by his artificial intelligence tool Grok.

Responding to a chart claiming to show the UK had the highest arrests for social media comments in the world, Musk posted: “Why is the UK government so fascist?” In separate posts hours earlier, Musk said the UK wanted to “suppress free speech” and referred to the country as a “prison island.”

The UK watchdog responsible for flagging online child sexual-abuse material to law enforcement agencies said it had found “criminal” images on the dark web allegedly generated by Grok.

The dark web images depict “sexualized and topless” images of girls between the ages of 11 and 13 and meet the bar for action by law enforcement, the Internet Watch Foundation said. xAI operates Grok and the social media platform X.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed action earlier this week, demanding Musk’s X urgently “get their act together” over the sexualized images. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in a statement Friday that media regulator Ofcom should use its “full legal powers” and warned the govenrment could “block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law.”

Penalizing X risks incurring the wrath of the Trump administration, which had previously threatened retaliation against the European Union, among others, over their efforts to rein in US tech giants. Still, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said that he had discussed the issue earlier this week with US Vice President JD Vance, who had expressed concern about how the technology was being used.

“I think he recognised the very seriousness with which images of women and children could be manipulated in this way, and he recognised how despicable, unacceptable, that is and I found him sympathetic to that position,” Lammy told the Guardian newspaper following his trip to Washington. “And in fact, we’ve been in touch again, today, about this very serious issue.”

(Updates with comments by deputy prime minister starting in the sixth paragraph.)