When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a livestream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk.
Over the weekend, users on social media reported that when asked, “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader?” with the “Think” setting enabled, Grok 3 noted in its “chain of thought” that it was explicitly instructed not to mention Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The chain of thought is the “reasoning” process the model uses to arrive at an answer to a question.
TechCrunch was able to replicate this behavior once, but as of publication time on Sunday morning, Grok 3 was once again mentioning Donald Trump in its answer to the misinformation query.
Igor Babuschkin, an xAI engineering lead, seemingly confirmed in a post on X on Sunday that Grok was briefly instructed to ignore sources that mentioned Musk or Trump spreading misinformation. Babuschkin said that xAI reverted the change as soon as users began pointing it out, noting it wasn’t in line with the company’s values.
While “misinformation” can be a politically charged and contested category, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly spread claims that were demonstrably false (as often pointed out by the Community Notes on Musk-owned X). In the past week alone, they’ve advanced the false narratives that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a “dictator” with a 4% public approval rating and that Ukraine started the ongoing conflict with Russia.
The controversial apparent tweak to Grok 3 comes as some criticize the model as being too left-leaning. This week, users discovered that Grok 3 would consistently say that President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI quickly patched the issue; Igor Babuschkin, the company’s head of engineering, called it a “really terrible and bad failure.”
When Musk announced Grok roughly two years ago, he pitched the AI model as edgy, unfiltered, and “anti-woke” — in general, willing to answer controversial questions other AI systems won’t. He delivered on some of that promise. Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok and Grok 2 would happily oblige, spewing colorful language you likely wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
But Grok models prior to Grok 3 hedged on political subjects and wouldn’t cross certain boundaries. In fact, one study found that Grok leaned to the political left on topics like transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the behavior on Grok’s training data — public web pages — and pledged to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” Others, including OpenAI, have followed suit, perhaps spurred by the Trump administration’s accusations of conservative censorship.
Updated 2:15 p.m. Pacific: Added comments from xAI’s engineering leader, Igor Babuschkin, in the fourth paragraph.
