Musk’s xAI says Grok’s 'white genocide' posts came after unauthorized change to the bot

Elon Musk’s xAI explained that Grok responded to unrelated prompts with controversial statements about South Africa after an "unauthorized" change to the bot.

Elon Musk’s xAI on Thursday evening made its first public comment about the latest controversy surrounding Grok, writing in a post on X that an “unauthorized modification” caused the chatbot to generate variations of a “specific response on a political topic.”

That controversial topic was “white genocide” in South Africa, and Grok was providing unprompted responses on the issue with such frequency that it led to an uproar among its user base.

The change to the chatbot “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company wrote. “We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.”

On Wednesday, numerous X users posted screenshots of answers that Grok wrote on the topic despite being asked about completely unrelated matters such as baseball salaries and cartoons. Like most of Musk’s companies, xAI doesn’t typically respond to reporters’ requests for comment and had remained silent on the matter until its post late Thursday.

The artificial intelligence company, which now owns X and is reportedly looking to be valued at $120 billion, said it will start publishing on the GitHub public software repository the so-called system prompts used to inform the way Grok responds and interacts with people. That will allow the public to review every change made to Grok’s system prompts in an effort to “strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI,” xAI said.