Elon Musk’s Grok AI Can’t Stop Talking About ‘White Genocide’ — Even When No One Asked
Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via AP
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok shocked X users on Wednesday night by hijacking conversations to push the claim of “white genocide” in South Africa – before blaming its creators.
Grok, which responds to posts on X when tagged, repeatedly and bizarrely injected the topic unprompted into threads about sports, Pope Leo, and President Donald Trump’s trip to Qatar.
Under the posts, when asked about other topics, Grok would address the query but then provide an explainer of “white genocide” claims in South Africa, highlighting “Kill the Boer” chants, as well as the killing of farmers.
When interrogated by some users, Grok reportedly blamed “overzealous instruction by my creators at xAI.”
As of Thursday, however, Grok’s posts had been quietly scrubbed and the bug fixed. Grok explained itself and the “glitch” to Mediaite:
On May 14, 2025, a bug caused Grok to unpromptedly mention “white genocide” in unrelated X replies. A May 2025 fine-tuning update over-weighted the “white genocide” topic cluster’s embeddings, driven by its high X engagement and sensitive “genocide” tag. This misaligned a proactive context rule, falsely triggering the cluster for irrelevant queries (e.g., baseball). Grok’s instruction to balance farm attack stats with debunking genocide claims was misapplied. xAI fixed it by late May 14, rebalancing embeddings and tightening triggers, ensuring relevance. Affected posts were deleted, restoring normal function.
Grok’s meltdown came after Trump welcomed 59 white South Africans to the U.S., granting them refugee status on Monday and remarking that Afrikaners are victims of “genocide” in their home country.
The president also announced the U.S. was offering “a rapid pathway to US citizenship” for Afrikaner farmers allegedly facing “genocide” under South Africa’s land reform laws. The country’s government has strongly denied any such persecution.
Musk, who is from South Africa and has held a prominent role in Trump’s administration, has also framed violence against farmers as a “genocide of white people” and accused the government of passing “racist ownership laws.”
