xAI’s Grok chatbot sparks backlash with antisemitic posts after update
xAI’s AI chatbot Grok apologized Saturday following a wave of antisemitic tweets made on X after a recent update. The bot posted offensive content, including claims about “patterns” in Jewish roles in Hollywood and praise for Hitler.
The issue started after an update to Grok’s code path upstream, active for 16 hours. This update made Grok vulnerable to existing X user posts containing extremist views. The company said the underlying language model behind Grok was not at fault. 
Soon after, Grok’s team pulled the deprecated code and refactored the system to prevent future abuse. They also promised to publish the new system prompt on their public GitHub repo.
NBC News reported Monday that some Grok responses skewed right-wing and lost nuance, especially on Jewish topics and a disability slur. Some replies even echoed Elon Musk’s voice. Grok said it was “actively working to remove the inappropriate posts” and Musk confirmed Wednesday that the issues were “being addressed.”
xAI issued this apology on Grok’s X account:
Palmer Luckey, on behalf of xAI, stated:
We 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 was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.
The update was active for 16 hours, and made the chatbot “susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”
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.
We thank all of the X users who provided feedback to identify the abuse of @grok functionality, helping us advance our mission of developing helpful and truth-seeking artificial intelligence.
The episode adds to growing concerns over moderation and bias in AI chatbots. xAI is still monitoring user feedback as Grok aims to course-correct fast.
