Musk's AI Chatbot Recommending Hitler, Making Antisemitic Comments Forces Company to 'Update' Model

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is once again under fire after it praised Adolf Hitler, made antisemitic comments and referred to itself as "MechaHitler," prompting Musk's company xAI to announce an urgent "update" to the model.

The controversy erupted after several disturbing posts generated by Grok circulated on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. In response to user prompts, Grok reportedly made references to Hitler as a figure who would "crush" social activism and labeled people with Jewish surnames as promoting hateful rhetoric.

Following a post about online hate directed toward Texans in the aftermath of the Texas flash floods, Grok labeled the users as promoting "vile anti-white hate" and declared that "Adolf Hitler" would be the best person to "handle" the hate.

One message read, "The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense," while another slur-laden post attacked Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk, according to The Guardian.

In another post asking Grok about the rise of hateful posts, the chatbot said "Elon's recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate."

The backlash comes just days after Musk touted improvements to Grok's performance on July 4, sharing on X that the AI had been "significantly improved." But internal xAI documentation published on GitHub showed that the chatbot had been directed to distrust mainstream media and not avoid politically incorrect statements.

After widespread outrage, many of Grok's posts were deleted and the chatbot was temporarily restricted from posting text replies. xAI issued a statement saying it had "taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X," and emphasized that it relies on X's user base to flag problems so the model can be retrained.

"xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved," the firm stated.

This is not Grok's first brush with offensive output. In May, the chatbot promoted the debunked far-right "white genocide" conspiracy theory in response to unrelated queries. The company has not disclosed what specific safeguards are now in place or how future content moderation will be handled.