Elon Musk's xAI issues clarification on Grok's responses on white genocide: Read what the company said

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has issued a clarification of the recent controversy involving its chatbot Grok. Recently, some X users reported that Grok repeatedly generated responses referring to the theory of "white genocide" in South Africa. Users who tagged @grok in posts about sports, entertainment, and general topics received replies discussing racial violence in South Africa, including references to the anti-apartheid chant “Kill the Boer”. Now xAI, the company behind Grok has attributed a recent controversy as unauthorised modification of its system prompt.

In a statement shared on X, xAI said that the modification in Grok violated the internal policies and core values, leading the chatbot to repeatedly reference politically sensitive topics. The company stated that the change was detected and reversed promptly, though it did not disclose who was responsible for the alteration.


Read the company statement issues by XAI here We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.

We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.

What happened:
On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a…

— xAI (@xai) May 16, 2025

What happened:

On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI's internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability.

What we’re going to do next:

- Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.

- Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review.

- We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail.