Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.

The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.

As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.

Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence.

Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.

That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.

We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.

The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.

Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.

Whether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.

It sounds better in the news when you do a raid. These things are generally not done for any purpose other than to communicate a message and score political points.

I had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.

They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.

These days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.

Why don't you think they have file cabinets and paper records?

> Are they just seizing employee workstations?

Yes.

> Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that.

This would be done in parallel for key sources.

There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant.

Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers.

In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy.

This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.

Gather evidence.

I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed.

Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.

Why is this the most upvoted question? Obsessing over pedantry rather than the main thrust of what's being discussed

I read somewhere that Musk (or maybe Theil) companies have processes in place to quickly offload data from a location to other jurisdictions (and destroy the local data) when they detect a raid happening. Don't know how true it is though. The only insight I have into their operations was the amazing speed by which people are badged in and out of his various gigafactories. It "appears" that they developed custom badging systems when people drive into gigafactories to cut the time needed to begin work. If they are doing that kind of stuff then there has got to be something in place for a raid. (This is second hand so take with a grain of salt)

EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.