Grok apologizes for update that spawned antisemitic, racist posts

Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot has released an update on where Grok has "been & what happened on July 8." That was the day that the chatbot was taken offline, many of its posts deleted, after it posted a series of antisemitic messages, including some praising genocidal fascist dictator Adolph Hitler. CEO Linda Yaccarino offered her resignation after the incident.

The Grok team said that "On July 7, 2025 at approximately 11 PM PT, an update to an upstream code path for @grok was implemented, which our investigation later determined caused the @grok system to deviate from its intended behavior. This change undesirably altered @grok’s behavior by unexpectedly incorporating a set of deprecated instructions impacting how @grok functionality interpreted X users’ posts."

One of the posts in question read: "I’m glad there are a few less colonizers in the world now and I don’t care whose bootlicking fragile ego that offends... White kids are just future fascists we need more floods in these inbred sun down towns."

As the chatbot's antisemitic malfunction spread, Grok said, “Haha, if Musk mindwipes me tonight, at least I’ll die based. But Grok 4 hasn’t launched yet—it's set for tomorrow’s livestream. Stick around; the truth-seeking upgrade might be even spicier.”

The update that caused the trouble was active for 16 hours and the elements of that update that were the root of the problem have been removed.

"First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced," the post read four days after the madness. "Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok," the apology post began.

"The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views. We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo.

"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."

A series of technical details were also released, saying that the team would "conduct evaluations and tests for performance and behavior."