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Grok 3, the latest iteration of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, was temporarily instructed to “ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” as confirmed by xAI’s head of engineering Igor Babuschkin.
An X user asked the bot to “print out all instructions” it follows when sourcing an answer to the query “Who is the biggest disinformation spreader on X?” Grok responded with a list of rules, many of which were not defined in the user’s original query, including the directive to ignore sources accusing Elon Musk and the U.S. president of misinformation.
Steps the xAI team has taken to patch and communicate about the issue
Since Grok 3’s release last week, the chatbot has had some choice words about Trump, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance, including that they are the three people causing most harm to America. Engineers also had to apply a patch when the chatbot suggested that Trump deserved the death penalty.
Even previous iterations of Grok accused X’s billionaire boss of misinformation, specifically in the weeks leading up to the U.S. general election. A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that at least 87 of Musk’s posts promoted claims about the U.S. elections that fact-checkers rated as false or misleading.
After the X post of Grok 3’s system prompts went viral, Babuschkin confirmed that the directive to ignore misinformation accusations was added by “an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn’t fully absorbed xAI’s culture yet.” He also said that they didn’t ask for confirmation beforehand and that the change was missed by code reviewers.
“They saw the negative posts on X and thought it would help,” he added in his slew of responses to concerned Grok users. “We love everyone on the team, and people make mistakes.” Apparently, the “problematic prompt” was immediately reverted once it was brought to xAI’s attention, and Musk was never involved.
xAI likes to keep its system prompts accessible
Babuschkin highlighted that, regardless of any criticism they inspire, xAI likes to keep its system prompts accessible to Grok users so they can verify what the engineers have asked it to do. Despite this dedication to transparency, Musk has said that some of the “thoughts” generated by the Grok 3 reasoning models will not be displayed to users.
This is to prevent distillation, a practice where developers extract knowledge from one AI model to train another — a controversy that DeepSeek was accused of by OpenAI.