Elon Musk's AI company issued an explanation and an apology for an anti-Semitic outburst by its chatbot, Grok.
xAI said the incident was caused by a since-deleted coding update that caused Grok to echo "extremist" posts on X.
Musk has touted his chatbot as an uncensored and "politically neutral" alternative to the "woke" ChatGPT, but finding a balance has proven difficult.
Within days of a new update touted by Musk, Grok responded to queries about the Texas floods with comments praising Adolf Hitler.
Grok said that Jewish-sounding names "keep popping up in extreme leftist activism, especially the anti-white variety" and suggested that Hitler would "spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time."
The offensive posts were promptly deleted, and xAI later provided an explanation for what happened.
The company blamed a coding change that made Grok "susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views."
"First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. 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 company said.
The update was active for 16 hours and has since been removed, the company said.
"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," the company said.
"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."
Musk has also fallen under scrutiny over his own erratic posts, many of which have targeted President Trump and his agenda in recent weeks.
Musk apologized in June for a series of inflammatory messages, including a baseless assertion, later deleted, that Trump is in the Epstein files.
Earlier this month, Trump lamented that his former ally had "gone off the rails" after Musk launched a third political party in protest of Trump's megabill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, becoming law.
