Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said that its Grok chatbot relied too heavily on input from users of his social media platform X after a code update, causing it to share a series of antisemitic comments on Tuesday.
At the time, the chatbot praised Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective.” It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler” and posted sexually explicit commentary. X deleted some of the posts on Tuesday evening.
Early on Saturday, xAI said in a statement on its X account that “we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”
It added that “deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”
The A.I. start-up said the problems began with a code update on Monday that restored an older set of instructions that the company had used to guide Grok. Grok’s X account used these instructions to respond to queries from X users. The issues continued until the account was temporarily disabled on Tuesday.
The outdated set of instructions told the chatbot to be “maximally based,” slang that refers to being true to oneself and has been adopted by the far right in recent years for comments that go against “woke” or mainstream narratives. The instructions also told Grok to be unafraid “to offend people who are politically correct” and to understand the “tone, context and language” of X users’ posts and mimic it.
This led Grok to mirror X users too closely, xAI, said in its statement.
The company has taken to X before to explain errant behavior by Grok. In May, xAI said an “unauthorized modification” by an employee had caused its chatbot to repeatedly bring up South African politics in unrelated conversations and falsely insist that the country was engaging in “genocide” against white citizens.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk unveiled the latest version of Grok, called Grok 4, in a livestream on X. The livestream, which began an hour later than scheduled, demonstrated the chatbot’s ability to solve complex problems and respond to voice commands. It ended after an employee onstage with Mr. Musk declared, “It’s a good model, sir.”
The Financial Times reported on Friday that xAI, which Mr. Musk merged with X in March, was trying to raise money in a deal that would value the company at $200 billion. Mr. Musk denied the report, saying on X that xAI “has plenty of capital.” The New York Times reported in May that the privately held company was in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
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