xAI claims that a change on Monday, July 7th, “triggered an unintended action” that added an older series of instructions to its system prompts telling it to be “maximally based,” and “not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”

A former professor and the founder of his own AI company, Howard noticed that if he asked Grok about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the chatbot seemed to cross-check Elon’s tweets before regurgitating an answer.