The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

The Pentagon is set to spend nearly a billion dollars for AI with four major Silicon Valley tech firms, Google, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic.

An AI model launched last week appears to have shipped with an unexpected occasional behavior: checking what its owner thinks first.

The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and “the white man.” It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.

Elon Musk has launched xAI’s Grok 4—calling it the “world’s smartest AI” and claiming it can ace Ph.D.-level exams and outpace rivals such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s o3 on tough benchmarks

Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, began responding with violent posts this week after the company tweaked its system to allow it to offer users more “politically incorrect” answers.

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.