As a result of this, xAI deleted some of Grok’s posts, temporarily took the chatbot offline, and changed its public system prompts. The chatbot was also banned in Turkey as it insulted the country’s president and X CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who even announced that she was stepping down this week, even though her announcement did not reference the latest Grok controversy, and her departure was reportedly months in the making.
After all of this, on Saturday, xAI said, “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.” After that, the company blamed an “update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” which represented an “independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”
Also worth mentioning is the fact that the update supposedly made Grok “susceptible to existing X user posts, including when such posts contained extremist views.”
xAI added that an “unintended action” had led to Grok receiving instructions such as “You tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct”.
The company moved forward and explained that Musk’s comments earlier this week claimed that Grok was “too compliant to user prompts” and “too eager to please and be manipulated.”
xAI’s posts did not mention the chain-of-thought summaries for the just-launched Grok 4, discovering that the latest version of the chatbot seems to consult Musk’s viewpoints and social media posts even before addressing controversial topics.
Even more so, historian Angus Johnstone pushed back against the idea that Grok was simply manipulated into publishing offensive content. He wrote on Bluesky that xAI, along with Musk’s explanations, are “easily falsified”.
Johnston said, “One of the most widely shared examples of Grok antisemitism was initiated by Grok with no previous bigoted posting in the thread — and with multiple users pushing back against Grok to no avail”.
More recently, Grok has also posted about the “white genocide,” expressed skepticism about the death toll of the Holocaust, and nearly censored unflattering facts about Musk and his then-ally Donald Trump, reported TechCrunch.
