What you need to know about Grok and the controversies surrounding it

NEW YORK– Elon Musk’s Grok continues to get into trouble, and this time, more and more governments around the world are trying to intervene.

First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data to help predict the most plausible next word in a sentence. This is the main product of Musk’s AI startup, xAI, which has been merged with his social media platform, X. Just like ChatGPT and Gemini, Musk’s company has also integrated AI image generation capabilities into the chatbot.

Musk’s deliberate efforts to make Grok a challenger to what he sees as the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics have repeatedly gotten the chatbot into trouble, such as last year when it spouted anti-Semitic tropes, praised Adolf Hitler and made other hateful comments to users of Musk’s X social media platform. The chatbot was also found last year to echo the opinions of its billionaire creator, so much so that it would sometimes search online for Musk’s position on an issue before offering his opinion.

Beyond politics, Elon Musk’s view of himself as a “free speech absolutist” has led his company to take a more lax approach to sexualized images. Other mainstream chatbots block the creation of pornographic images. OpenAI had initially planned to allow ChatGPT to engage in “erotica for verified adults”, starting last month, but it did not do so.

Here are some of the more recent controversies Grok has been involved in:

Grok has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or in sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children.

The problem emerged after last year’s launch of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that lets users create videos and images by typing text prompts. It includes a “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.

It snowballed late last month when Grok, hosted on

Last week, governments around the world condemned the platform and opened investigations.

To remedy the situation, xAI says it is now blocking non-paying users from generating or editing images after a global backlash erupted over sexualized deepfakes.

One of Grok’s most recent versions echoed Musk’s opinions, even going so far as to search online for his position on an issue before giving his side.

The unusual behavior of Grok 4, released in July, surprised some experts.

In an example widely shared on social media and reproduced by a researcher, Grok was asked to comment on the conflict in the Middle East. The question asked made no mention of Musk, but the chatbot asked for advice anyway.

The chatbot told independent researcher Simon Willison that “Elon Musk’s position could provide context, given his influence,” according to a video of the interaction. “We are currently reviewing his opinions to see if they guide the response.”

After Grok allegedly posted content insulting the Turkish president and other Turkish figures, a court last year ordered him banned from the platform.

The chatbot posted vulgarities against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his late mother and celebrities in response to users’ questions about X, a pro-government news channel reported. Offensive responses were also directed against the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, according to other media reports.

The chatbot’s behavior prompted Ankara’s prosecutor to file a request for restrictions under Turkish Internet law, citing a threat to public order. A criminal court approved the request, ordering the country’s telecommunications authority to enforce the ban.

Grok was forced to backtrack after posting anti-Semitic messages, including comments praising Adolf Hitler, saying he was deleting “inappropriate messages.”

The Grok chatbot shared several anti-Semitic messages, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be classified as Nazism.

“Calling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said. He also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of messages that were later apparently deleted.

After posting one of the posts, Grok walked back his comments, saying it was an “unacceptable mistake from a previous model iteration, quickly removed” and that he condemned “Nazism and Hitler unequivocally – his actions were genocidal horrors.”

Musk said Grok has been significantly improved and users “should notice a difference.”

Because of these controversies over anti-Semitism, a group of Jewish lawmakers wrote to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth late last year expressing concerns about the Pentagon’s plans to work with xAI.

“If Mr. Musk retains the ability to directly change the results of Grok for Government, this poses a serious and unacceptable risk to American national security and constitutional values,” the letter read.

xAI blamed “unauthorized editing” on Grok as the reason she continued to speak about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide.”

The company said in May that an employee made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”

Grok had posted an article about “white genocide” in South Africa a day earlier in his responses to users on X, asking various questions, most of which had nothing to do with South Africa.

There were exchanges about the Max streaming service reviving the HBO name, video games and baseball that all quickly veered into unrelated comments about alleged calls for violence against South Africa’s white farmers. This echoed opinions shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.