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Musk’s Grok spews antisemitic posts after “improvement”

X’s AI chatbot was told to “not shy away” from “politically incorrect claims” and was soon praising Hitler. The change was rolled back after dozens of offensive responses surfaced.

Jon Keegan

7/9/25 9:28AM

A few weeks ago, after expressing his displeasure that his Grok chatbot was “parroting legacy media” when it wrote that data showed “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly,” an accurate response, Elon Musk vowed to make some changes to fix the problem.

Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media.

Working on it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 18, 2025

Musk’s plan to adjust the chatbot raised alarms that Grok, which lives on his X platform, would simply be trained to mirror his increasingly right-wing worldview in its responses to the 250 million daily users of the platform. Musk has repeatedly said that Grok would be “maximally truth seeking” and an alternative to mainstream news sources that he says are biased.

Musk posted that an updated version of Grok with “advanced reasoning” would “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” and would be retrained on that.

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2025

Less than two weeks later, Musk announced that Grok had been “improved significantly” and that users would notice a difference when they asked the chatbot questions.

They did.

Among the many troubling examples that users shared on social media, Grok used antisemitic tropes to attack Jewish movie executives, casting aspersions toward users with Jewish last names, and in a post that has since been deleted, when asked about a historical figure who might be best suited to deal with “anti-white hate,” Grok responded: “Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

Hours later, the official Grok account announced that “inappropriate” posts made by the chatbot were being removed.

We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on…
— Grok (@grok) July 8, 2025

On the GitHub repository, which has text instructions for Grok, one line was removed:

“The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5