Elon Musk ripped into his own newly improved artificial intelligence chatbot Grok after it declared that the biggest threat facing Western civilization was “misinformation.”
The billionaire Tesla and xAI chief had announced a new version of Grok on Wednesday night, a day after the bot went on an antisemitic tear accusing Jews of “anti-white hate” and praising Adolf Hitler in several posts.
The company deleted the posts and said it was “taking action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.” It nevertheless went forward with Wednesday’s launch of Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, a new “multi-agent” version of the chatbot that uses “tools” to solve problems, Tech Crunch reported.
After the launch, users fed the new Grok prompts in an effort to test it, including asking about the greatest threat facing western civilization and how Grok would mitigate the threat.
“The biggest current threat to Western civilization as of July 10, 2025, is societal polarization fueled by misinformation and disinformation,” Grok replied. “This is an internal threat that undermines the core pillars of Western societies—democracy, rule of law, social cohesion, and shared values—from within.”
Other threats such as climate change and AI are also severe but are more external or long-term, it added.
“Polarization weakens the West’s ability to respond to these collectively, making it the foundational threat,” Grok explained, citing the World Economic Forum, U.S. and European government assessments, historical precedent, and books about President Donald Trump’s unpredictable leadership as its sources.
Musk was apparently not happy with the answer.
“Sorry for this idiotic response,” he wrote in a post on X. “Will fix in the morning.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what response Musk would have preferred from Grok. In the past, the world’s richest man has named declining birthrates, Democratic state judges and empathy as the biggest threats to western civilization.
Before Grok inadvertently called out its own creator as an existential threat to western civilization, Musk had described the tool in terms that were practically hagiographic.
“I would expect Grok to discover new technologies that are actually useful no later than next year, and maybe end of this year. It might discover new physics next year… Let that sink in,” he said during Wednesday’s demo, according to The Verge.
It remains to be seen whether Grok 4 will manage to avoid the type of racist outbursts that came to define previous iterations of the technology.
Earlier this year, Grok regularly responded to unrelated prompts by ranting about “white genocide” in South Africa, Musk’s country of birth—something that it seemed to admit came at Musk’s direction.
Musk himself shrugged off this week’s antisemitic hate, writing simply, “Never a dull moment on this platform.”
The offensive posts were apparently triggered by changes made Sunday to Grok’s system prompts, The Verge reported. The new instructions told the chatbot to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.”
Amid the controversy, X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino announced she was stepping down.
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