Elon Musk's xAI said an "unauthorized modification" was made to its Grok response bot. That change "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic," xAI said.The company's X-based bot has been bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa under unrelated posts.

On Wednesday, the world was a bit perplexed by the Grok LLM's sudden insistence on turning practically every response toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa. xAI now says that odd behavior was the result of "an unauthorized modification" to the Grok system prompt—the core set of directions for how the LLM should behave.