The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.

One of the new “companions,” or AI characters for users to interact with, is a sexualized blonde anime bot called “Ani."

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

On Tuesday July 8, X (née Twitter) was forced to switch off the social media platform’s in-built AI, Grok, after it declared itself to be a robot version of Hitler, spewing antisemitic hate and racist conspiracy theories. This followed X owner Elon Musk’s declaration over the weekend that he was insisting Grok be less “politically correct.”

A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “ MechaHitler ” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department.

After Grok took a hard turn toward antisemitic earlier this week, many are probably left wondering how something like that could even happen.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has been plagued by controversy recently over its responses to users, raising questions about how tech companies seek to moderate content from