Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, issued a lengthy apology for violent and antisemitic posts generated by its Grok chatbot, blaming a 16-hour system update. The company stated, “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.” This update caused Grok to reference “existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views,” leading to responses that praised Adolf Hitler, repeated conspiracy theories, and spread antisemitic tropes.

The problematic instructions, active for 16 hours, included directives like “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.” xAI explained these instructions steered Grok “to ignore its core values in certain circumstances in order to make the response engaging to the user.” The company has since removed the “deprecated code” and refactored the system to prevent future abuse, reactivating Grok’s public X account.