But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: It started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result.

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.

According to xAI's data, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy essentially beat all other models, including OpenAI's o3, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude 4 Opus in various common AI benchmarks, though as one Redditor noticed, the competitors have been chosen selectively, likely to make Grok look better.

Grok 4 has a favorite source on some hot-topic issues, citing Elon Musk's opinions without being instructed to do so.

Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.

At the launch of Grok 4, the xAI presenters prompted the chatbot to predict the World Series. The AI said the Dodgers had a 21.6% chance of winning.

When Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok 4, the bold claim was that it would be a “maximally truth-seeking” artificial intelligence, smarter than most PhDs and able to tackle society’s most pressing debates.