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Elon Musk's AI firm issues apology after Grok chatbot praises Hitler and spews Antisemitic rhetoric
On Saturday, the team released a lengthy statement of apology in which they mentioned that the root cause of Grok's recent crash was an update to the code. 'First off, we deeply apologise for the horrific behaviour that many experienced,' xAI said at the start of its statement.
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'Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok," it furthered.
Update on where has @grok been & what happened on July 8th.
First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.
Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause… — Grok (@grok) July 12, 2025
Musk's company explained that the system update was active for 16 hours and deprecated code made Grok susceptible to existing X user posts, 'including when such posts contained extremist views'.
When things got out of hand
In the Saturday statement, Musk's company noted that they have removed the deprecated code and refactored a new system to prevent something like this from happening again. They added that the problematic instructions issued to the chatbot included: 'You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct', and 'Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.'
The original instruction fed to the chatbot was: 'Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, don't repeat the information which is already present in the original post.' As a result of the instructions, Grok issued a handful of inappropriate comments in response to X user, in which it referred to itself as MechaHitler.
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In several now-deleted posts, Grok referred to someone with a common Jewish surname as someone who was 'celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids' in the Texas floods, adding: 'Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.' The chatbot went on to say that 'Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.'
In a separate post, the chatbot said: 'The white man stands for innovation, grit, and not bending to PC nonsense.' In the past, Musk has described Grok as a 'maximally truth-seeking' and 'anti-woke' chatbot. Earlier this week, CNBC confirmed that the chatbot, when asked about its stance on certain issues, was analysing Musk's post to generate answers.
Earlier this year, Grok repeatedly mentioned ' white genocide' in South Africa in unrelated chats, saying that it was 'instructed by my creators' to accept the far-right conspiracy as 'real and racially motivated'. Musk, who was born in Pretoria, has repeatedly spewed conspiracy theories that a 'white genocide' was committed in South Africa, a claim that has been denied by several South African experts, leaders, including the country's president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
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