Elon Musk's Grok AI Faces Backlash for Briefly Censoring Criticism of Musk and Trump

xAI's head of engineering blames unauthorized changes by a former employee for the controversial instructions, which were quickly reversed.

Grok 3, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, was briefly programmed to ignore sources accusing Musk and Donald Trump of spreading misinformation, sparking criticism of bias and censorship.
The instructions were reportedly added by an unnamed former OpenAI employee working at xAI, who made the change without company approval, according to xAI's head of engineering Igor Babuschkin.
Babuschkin confirmed the issue was promptly addressed, with the instructions reverted to align with xAI’s stated values of transparency and truth-seeking.
The incident follows other controversial outputs from Grok 3, including responses naming Musk and Trump as deserving the death penalty, which xAI engineers also quickly patched.
Despite the controversies, Grok 3 has seen significant user growth since its release, with app downloads and web traffic surging globally.