Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI apologized to users for antisemitic posts authored by its chatbot Grok, pinning the blame on an update after conducting an investigation.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced,” the company said in a lengthy post on social media platform X. “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.”
After an update last week, Grok was producing responses where the chatbot made broad generalizations about individuals with Jewish surnames, authored some posts praising Adolf Hitler and spread antisemitic tropes.
The official chatbot account said xAI was deleting the antisemitic posts on Tuesday and had “taken action” to ban “hate speech” from Grok.
“The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views,” xAI wrote on Saturday. “We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo.”
xAI rolled out the latest version of Grok on Wednesday, with Musk arguing that Grok 4 is the “smartest AI model in the world.”
“It really is remarkable to see the advancement of artificial intelligence and how quickly it is evolving,” the tech billionaire said, indicating that the newest version of the chatbot, which was first launched in 2023, is “smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously.”
