Grok 4 chatbot is guided by Elon Musk’s public stance when formulating answers to sensitive questions
The new version of artificial intelligence Grok 4 from the company xAI focuses on Elon Musk’s public statements when forming answers to sensitive topics. The chatbot repeatedly referred to Musk’s posts on the X social network, answering questions about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the topic of abortion or US immigration law. About this informs TechCrunch,
In the process of processing requests, Grok 4 forms a so-called “chain-of-thought” — a chain of reasoning, in which journalists found wording such as “searching for Elon Musk’s views.” This may indicate a priority use of his thoughts during the formation of answers. TechCrunch confirmed this during its own testing.
Although Grok 4 strives to present balanced information, the final answers often coincide with Musk’s position. Such a shift, as the publication notes, may be related to the desire of the developers to make the model less “woke” — previously Musk himself repeatedly criticized it for “excessive political correctness” associated with training “on the entire Internet.”
After Grok was updated on July 4, within days the bot began issuing controversial and offensive statements, including criticizing Democrats, spreading anti-Semitic comments about “Jewish executives” in Hollywood, and praising Hitler. In response, the account was restricted, the posts were removed, and the instructions for the model were changed.
At the same time, Grok demonstrated a tough stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, publicly calling Russia the aggressor and the only guilty party in the conflict. Unlike companies like OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, xAI does not release system maps for its models, making it impossible to independently verify the Grok 4’s data, training principles, and alignment.
Despite the scandals, xAI is promoting Grok as a flagship product of its ecosystem. The model is already available to users of the X social network as part of a paid Premium+ subscription, and according to Musk, the Grok will appear in Tesla cars next week. The company is also trying to get enterprise customers to use the Grok API, offering the model as an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic products.
