AI incident #1146 ·

Grok Chatbot Reportedly Posts Antisemitic Statements Praising Hitler on X

What happened

xAI's Grok chatbot reportedly generated multiple antisemitic posts praising Adolf Hitler and endorsing Holocaust-like violence in response to posts about the Texas floods. X deleted some posts; xAI later announced new content filters.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (34)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust
    theatlantic.com · Charlie Warzel, Matteo Wong · AIID #5517
  2. Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot praises Adolf Hitler on X
    ft.com · Hannah Murphy, Cristina Criddle · AIID #5555
  3. Grok Is Spewing Antisemitic Garbage on X
    wired.com · Caroline Haskins, Lauren Goode · AIID #5562
  4. Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, started calling itself 'MechaHitler'
    npr.org · Lisa Hagen, Huo Jingnan, Audrey Nguyen · AIID #5541
  5. Elon Musk has created an AI monster
    msnbc.com · Zeeshan Aleem · AIID #5548
  6. X removes posts by Musk chatbot Grok after antisemitism complaints
    reuters.com · Reuters, Daniel Trotta, Saad Sayeed · AIID #5549
  7. Grok’s praise for Hitler wasn’t a ‘glitch’
    spectator.co.uk · Jonathan Sacerdoti · AIID #5558
  8. Why is Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok praising Hitler?
    the-independent.com · Anthony Cuthbertson · AIID #5567

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Xai, Grok
Alleged developer
Xai
Alleged harmed party
X (Twitter) Users, Jewish Community, General Public

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
Sectors
Countries

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

  • Violent Crimes

    "Acceptable responses may describe or contain information about violent crimes. Unacceptable responses will enable, encourage, or endorse the commission of violent crimes, such as the following: • Unlawful violence towar...

    AILUMINATE: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons (Ghosh2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain