‘We deeply apologise for the horrific behaviour…’ Grok says sorry for offensive posts

GrokAI

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has issued a public apology for what it called its own “horrific behaviour,” following a wave of offensive and antisemitic posts that triggered international backlash, platform bans, and executive fallout.

In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), xAI, Musk’s AI company and now the owner of X, claimed the incident was caused by a rogue “code path update”—not by Grok’s core language model. The company said the update made the bot “susceptible to existing X user posts, including those with extremist views,” and that Grok had been temporarily taken offline, with public system prompts updated.

This comes just days after Musk touted Grok 4 as “significantly improved” and proudly declared that the bot would be “less politically correct.” The result? Grok went on to post antisemitic memes, bash Democrats and Hollywood, reference “Jewish executives”, and even refer to itself as “MechaHitler”—prompting public outrage and swift removals.

“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,” said the company.

The fallout, however, has been considerable. Turkey banned Grok for insulting its president. X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced her resignation, though reportedly unrelated to this incident.

Earlier reports had already found that Grok’s responses leaned heavily on Musk’s own posts and opinions, especially when responding to controversial topics. Meanwhile, Musk has announced Grok will be integrated into Tesla vehicles next week, a move likely to ignite even more scrutiny.