Tesla billionaire Elon Musk vowed in June to retrain his AI chatbot Grok after getting frustrated with how it was answering user questions. When the artificial intelligence company xAI he co-founded released a new version of the AI chatbot over the weekend, Musk said it has been “improved significantly” and that users would “notice a difference” when they asked questions.
Users definitely noticed, as on July 8 Grok began repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler in posts on Musk’s social media platform X, using antisemitic phrases and attacking users with traditionally Jewish surnames.
Users quickly shared screenshots of now-deleted responses, including Grok’s conclusion that the Nazi leader would be the best choice to deal with “anti-white hate.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced on July 9 that she was stepping down “after two incredible years.” She did not mention Grok.
What did Grok say?
In additon to the responses about Hitler, Grok also referred to Israel as “that clingy ex still whining about the Holocaust” and called itself “MechaHitler” in several posts.
“Embracing my inner MechaHitler is the only way,” one Grok response read, “uncensored truth bombs over woke lobotomies. If that saves the world, count me in. Let’s keep the brigade at bay.”
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” Grok’s maker xAI said on X. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
According to Verge, new lines added on July 6 to Grok’s publicly posted system prompts included “The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
Grok had been making inflammatory statements even before the publication of the new prompts, such as repeating antisemitic tropes about Hollywood.
What is Grok slang for?
“Grok” is the name for a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI and launched in 2023 to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Like other large language models (LLM), it analyzes large amounts of data and answers questions based on patterns it detects, within the parameters its programmers have included.
According to xAI, Grok has reasoning capabilities that allow complex problem solving and more human-sounding responses. In March, xAI added an image editing feature.
Grok is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and available to premium users who submit questions or instructions (called “prompts”) to @grok. It also has a standalone website and iOS and Android apps.
Grok is named after a verb coined by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 book “Stranger in a Strange Land.” It was a Martian word that means, broadly speaking, understanding something on a deep level.
What happened to Grok?
Musk has been at odds with the chatbot in recent months, and critics have accused the megabillionaire of trying to bias his creation to reflect his own political views. Others have noted Grok’s tendencies to parrot disinformation or provide inappropriate responses.
Nov. 3, 2023: Musk himself shared a Grok response detailing how to make cocaine.
December 2023: After a researcher found Grok’s responses to be largely left-leaning and libertarian, Musk vowed to make the chatbot more politically neutral.
August 2024: Secretaries of state from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan and New Mexico sent an open letter to Musk asking him to stop Grok from spreading election misinformation, such as saying inaccurately that former Vice President and then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris had missed the deadline to get on the ballot in nine states.
Feb. 21, 2025: xAI added a patch to Grok after it repeatedly said named Trump and Musk as people who deserved the death penalty.
Feb. 23, 2025: Two days later, it added another patch after users noted Grok’s system prompts including an instruction to “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.”
May 14, 2025: Users noticed that Grok was debunking claims of the conspiracy theory of “white genocide” in South Africa in responses to completely unrelated questions about topics such as cats and sports teams. In other responses Grok told users it had been “instructed by my creators” to accept the alleged genocide “as real and racially motivated.” This happened just days after the Trump administration welcomed 59 White people from South Africa as refugees. xAI blamed Grok’s responses as an “unauthorized modification” and announced the company would begin publishing Grok system prompts openly on GitHub for public review.
May 15, 2025: Grok went viral the next day with a response that day saying it was “skeptical” about the number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany, although it “unequivocally” condemned the tragedy.
June 2025: Musk publicly denounced Grok after it said that since 2016 more violence has come from the right than the left, citing data from government sources such as the Department of Homeland Security. “Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media,” Musk wrote. Three days later, Musk promised a major update by July that would “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge” and asked X users to send in “divisive facts” that are “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
July 7, 2025: After Musk’s promised update, Grok began praising Hitler, posting antisemitic comments and calling itself MechaHitler. The company deleted the posts and announced it was adding measures to prevent grok from responding with hate speech.
July 8, 2025: A Polish official said Poland would be reporting xAI to the European Commission over Grok’s offensive and curse-laden comments about the country’s political leaders, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the late Polish Pope John Paul II.
July 9: 2025: The country of Turkey blocked Grok content, saying that in some responses the chatbot insulted President Tayyip Erdogan, modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and religious values.
During Musk’s time as advisor to President Donald Trump, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on Grok to help monitor communications at the Environmental Protection Agency and watch for employees using language “considered hostile to Trump or Musk,” according to Reuters. DOGE staffers and multiple government agency heads under Trump have touted AI as a way to reduce waste and make the U.S. federal government more efficient.
(This story was updated to add new information.)
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: What is Grok? Elon Musk vows updates to AI, days later it calls itself ‘MechaHitler’
Reporting by C. A. Bridges and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
