But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: It started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result.

Rhea Purohit in Vibe Check Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Grok 4 is topping some big AI benchmarks. So why have the responses to it been so mixed? And how come Every’s engineers aren’t using it much?

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.

Elon Musk on Wednesday unveiled Grok 4, a new version of his X platform's AI chatbot. The update comes a day after the bot posted antisemitic content on the social media network. Musk introduced the new model in a livestream on X late Wednesday, calling Grok 4 "the smartest AI in the world."

When Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok 4, the bold claim was that it would be a “maximally truth-seeking” artificial intelligence, smarter than most PhDs and able to tackle society’s most pressing debates.

In a livestream with xAI colleagues, the billionaire entrepreneur described current AI systems as “primitive” and not for “serious” commercial use.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.

AI safety researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic are criticizing Elon Musk's xAI for "completely irresponsible" safety practices.