Internal docs show xAI paid contractors to "hillclimb" Grok's rank on a coding leaderboard above Anthropic's Claude.

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

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

Elon Musk on Wednesday unveiled Grok 4, a new version of his X platform's AI chatbot. The update comes a day after the bot posted antisemitic content on the social media network. Musk introduced the new model in a livestream on X late Wednesday, calling Grok 4 "the smartest AI in the world."

In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said its Grok chatbot had also undergone a code update that caused it to share antisemitic messages this week.