Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, says an “unauthorized modification” led its Grok chatbot to post unsolicited claims on social media about the persecution and “genocide” of white people in South Africa.

Some X users on Wednesday asked Grok – the AI chatbot available through Elon Musk’s social media platform – questions about simple topics like baseball players or videos of fish being flushed down toilets.

Several X users were shocked yesterday when they found that asking Grok — X's AI chatbot — innocuous questions about Fortnite, HBO, and the WWE seemingly caused the bot to go off on an unrelated tangent about South Africa and "white genocide."