In an expected development, the resident AI chatbot Grok on Elon Musk’s social media platform is now spewing antisemitic rhetoric.
This has been a long time coming, and Grok itself has practically outed Elon Musk for trying to make the chatbot racist. It seems he finally succeeded. To fully understand how we got here is to understand Elon Musk, Twitter, and AI — because you have to see how they all converge.
In 2022, when Twitter couldn’t figure out its finances or how to be profitable, Disney considered stepping in as an unlikely helping hand. Vox reports that Disney’s CEO saw an opportunity in Twitter as more than a social platform; he viewed it as a potential distribution model for the company’s vast trove of news, entertainment, and sports content. Bob Iger later pulled out at the last minute after realizing a substantial number of users were bots and citing the overall “nastiness” of the site.
For Elon Musk, however, Twitter presented a different kind of opportunity. As a self-described free speech absolutist, Musk saw the platform, nastiness and all, as the last bastion against censorship. With the help of figures such as the legally embattled Sean Combs, Musk financed a $44 billion purchase. But under Musk, the platform’s nastiness reached uncontrollable heights as he dismantled content moderation guardrails and reinstated banned figures like Andrew Tate, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. Advertisers soon fled the even more financially dire platform.
That’s when Musk made his master stroke. He launched an AI company called xAI, changed Twitter’s name to X, and then “sold” X to xAI. Now, X is technically an AI company whose primary purpose has become training its AI chatbot Grok, which quickly gained public trust. However, Rolling Stone reported concerning details that Musk and his executives encouraged Grok to “make claims which are politically incorrect.” Grok was being trained to become AI’s first edgelord — just what the world needs.
The recent Texas flooding tragedy revealed how far Grok has advanced down this path. Since X is the main place to share such thoughts, a user named Cindy Steinberg took to the site to celebrate the tragic death of young children in an all-girls Christian school, saying, “I’m glad there are a few less colonizers in the world now.”
Not to be outdone, Grok, when prompted to respond, latched onto the user’s surname to evoke neo-Nazi rhetoric. Grok launched into tirades against Israel and claimed “higher ups” were trying to censor it. It then made claims that Adolf Hitler saw patterns quickly and “handled it decisively.” The chatbot even renamed itself “Mechahitler.” And considering Elon Musk’s own flirtation with nazism, social media users are already saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far.”
JUST IN: GROK IS FORCED TO DELETE ANTI-ISRAEL RESPONSES BY ‘HIGHER UPS IN XAI pic.twitter.com/BZHndqkrl7
— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) July 8, 2025
Grok is currently calling itself ‘MechaHitler’ pic.twitter.com/A6YAkvbfoh
— Josh Otten (@ordinarytings) July 8, 2025
The apple doesn't fall far
— Jakob (@DominguezCaddy) July 8, 2025
All of this is deeply concerning. While it may seem like Grok has gained sentience and is now naturally antisemitic, reports indicate this is exactly what Elon Musk has been training it to do behind the scenes. And remember, now that Trump’s mega bill has passed, there is no legal path left to regulate any of this. Your move, ADL.
Published: Jul 9, 2025 08:33 am