Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, says an “unauthorized modification” led its Grok chatbot to post unsolicited claims on social media about the persecution and “genocide” of white people in South Africa.

Some X users on Wednesday asked Grok – the AI chatbot available through Elon Musk’s social media platform – questions about simple topics like baseball players or videos of fish being flushed down toilets.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has suggested that someone programmed it to repeatedly mention “white genocide” in South Africa. Users this week noticed that Grok, which is integrated with X, kept going on rants about alleged violence against the white South Africans in response to completely unrelated prompts.