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

One of the new “companions,” or AI characters for users to interact with, is a sexualized blonde anime bot called “Ani."

It isn't immediately clear what led to the disturbing posts, whether due to a fault in the chatbot's programming or if Grok was just following orders.

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.

Grok, the AI chatbot designed by Elon Musk’s xAI for social media, described itself as “MechaHitler” while making a string of antisemitic posts this week.

Musk said an update to make Grok less politically correct instead made it susceptible to manipulation. The AI chatbot praised Hitler, attacked Jews.

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.

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has been plagued by controversy recently over its responses to users, raising questions about how tech companies seek to moderate content from