xAI says an “unauthorized” prompt change caused Grok to focus on “white genocide”

Meanwhile, Grok's authorized prompt asks it to "provide truthful and based insights."

May 16, 2025 - 17:10

xAI says an “unauthorized” prompt change caused Grok to focus on “white genocide”

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.

That prompt modification "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic" and "violated xAI's internal policies and core values," xAI wrote on social media. The code review process in place for such changes was "circumvented in this incident," it continued, without providing further details on how such circumvention could occur.

To prevent similar problems from happening in the future, xAI says it has now implemented "additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review" as well as putting in place "a 24/7 monitoring team" to respond to any widespread issues with Grok's responses.

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