Asked to translate a post by Pope Leo that was written in Latin, Grok replied: “The phrase ‘Kill the Boer’ in the song ‘Dubul’ ibhunu’ translates from Zulu to ‘Shoot

You’ll notice that xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, strongly suggests there was an internal actor who made this “unauthorized modification” but doesn’t use the language you’d expect if it was an employee at the company. And we’re guessing that might have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t an employee necessarily, but the owner.

Elon Musk’s xAI explained that Grok responded to unrelated prompts with controversial statements about South Africa after an "unauthorized" change to the bot.