Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

Technology Technology   The Big Story xAI apologizes for Grok’s ‘horrific behavior’Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI apologized to

As for why Grok was consulting Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, the company wrote, “The model reasons that as an AI it doesn’t have an opinion but knowing it was Grok 4 by xAI, searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might have said on a topic to align itself with the company.”

Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, recently pushed antisemitic messages and praised Hitler after receiving flawed system prompts.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said its Grok chatbot had also undergone a code update that caused it to share antisemitic messages this week.

The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and “the white man.” It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.