Musk's xAI blames Grok's "white genocide" responses on unauthorized update

• A South African court in February ruled there was no validity to the claims of a "white genocide."

Driving the news: "On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI's internal policies and core values," xAI said in a post late Thursday night.

• The company, which developed the Grok chatbot, said the required code review process "was circumvented in this incident."
• It also said it will publish Grok system prompts to GitHub to increase transparency.

Catch up quick: X users on Wednesday pointed out that Grok would respond to unrelated queries with misleading and previously debunked answers about a purported "white genocide" occurring in South Africa.

• In January, South Africa enacted a law allowing the government to seize land from white citizens — who own the majority of the land in the country — to address historic inequalities caused by apartheid.

Zoom out: Musk is a close adviser to Trump, who has made restricting immigration into the U.S. a top priority.

• Despite that, Trump has granted refugee status to white Afrikaners while denying those protections to other groups.
• In a February post on Truth Social, Trump accused South Africa of "treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY" in response to the land confiscation law.

Go deeper: How false "white genocide" claims became central to Trump's view of South Africa