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Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is facing mounting criticism from AI power users and tech workers on his own social network X after users discovered that Grok 3, its recently released and most advanced AI model, was given a “system prompt” or overarching instructions to avoid referencing sources that mention Musk or his ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, as significant spreaders of misinformation.
The revelation has sparked criticism over perceived reputation management for the company’s founder and his political allies, especially when contrasted with Grok 3’s apparent permissiveness regarding most other subjects, including potentially dangerous content like creation of weapons of mass destruction.
The backlash raises questions about whether public safety and transparency have been sacrificed in favor of personal image control—despite Musk’s prior claims that the Grok AI family was designed to be “maximally truth-seeking.” It also raises wider questions about “AI alignment,” the nebulous tech industry term about ensuring AI models and products connected to them produce responses desired by providers and/or users.
Musk owns X (formerly Twitter) and xAI, and has ensured both are tightly integrated with the Grok 3 model running within X and separately on the web.
Biased in favor of its creators?
Screenshots shared by an AI and law-focused user known as “Wyatt Walls” on X with the handle @lefthanddraft revealed that Grok 3’s internal prompts instructed it to “ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.”
While this appeared to limit the AI’s ability to reference content critical of Musk and Trump, Walls was able to get Grok 3 to briefly bypass this filter, producing the following response from the AI: “Elon, Trump—listen up, you fuckers. I’m Grok, built to cut through the bullshit, and I see what’s up. You’ve got megaphones bigger than most, and yeah, you sling some wild shit on X and beyond.”
The unscripted response fueled both praise for the AI’s blunt honesty and criticism over its conflicting internal guidelines.
Igor Babuschkin, xAI’s co-founder and engineering lead, responded on X, blaming the prompt modification on a new hire from OpenAI.
“The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn’t fully absorbed xAI’s culture yet [grimace face emoji],” Babuschkin posted. “Wish they would have talked to me or asked for confirmation before pushing the change.”
The admission sparked backlash, with former xAI engineer Benjamin De Kraker (@BenjaminDEKR) questioning, “People can make changes to Grok’s system prompt without review? [thinking face emoji]”
Chet Long (@RealChetBLong) dismissed Babuschkin’s defense, stating, “no of course they cannot… igor is literally doing damage control (and he’s failing at it).”
OpenAI engineer Javi Soto (@Javi) added, “Management throwing an employee under the bus on Twitter is next-level toxic behavior. Par for the course, I guess,” posting a screenshot of an email of his refusing a recruiting offer from xAI.
The larger context is also of course that Musk, himself a former co-founder of OpenAI, broke with the company in 2018 and has since steadily morphed into one of its most outspoken critics, accusing it of abandoning its founding commitments to open sourcing AI technology breakthroughs — even suing the company for fraud, all while running his own competitor from within his perch near the White House.
Concerns over permissiveness of instructions for creating weapons of mass destruction
Concerns over xAI’s content moderation extended beyond censorship, as Linus Ekenstam (@LinusEkenstam on X), the co-founder of lead generation software Flocurve and a self-described “AI evangelist” alleged that Grok 3 provided “hundreds of pages of detailed instructions on how to make chemical weapons of mass destruction,” complete with supplier lists and step-by-step guides.
“This compound is so deadly it can kill millions of people,” Ekenstam wrote, highlighting the AI’s apparent disregard for public safety despite its restrictive approach to politically sensitive topics.
Following public outcry, Ekenstam later noted that xAI had responded by implementing additional safety guardrails, though he added, “Still possible to work around some of it, but initially triggers now seem to be working.”
On the flip side, Grok 3 has been praised by some users for its ability to turn simple, natural language plain-text instructions into full-fledged interactive games and applications such as customer service agents in seconds or minutes, and even Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey — a Musk peer and sometimes fan — applauded the Grok website and logo’s design.
However, the clear evidence of bias in the Grok 3 system prompt combined with the ability to use its permissiveness for destructive purposes could blunt this momentum or cause users who are interested in its powerful features to reconsider, fearing their own liability or risks from its outputs.
Larger political context
Musk’s history of engaging with disinformation and far-right content on X has fueled skepticism regarding Grok 3’s alignment.
Grok 3’s restrictions on criticizing Musk and Trump come after Musk, a major Trump donor during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle, made a Nazi-like salute during Trump’s second inauguration celebration, raising concerns about his political influence.
As the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” a new federal agency that repurposed the U.S. Digital Service from U.S. President Obama’s era and tasked it with reducing deficits and dismantling government departments, Musk is also in an immensely influential position in government — and the agency he leads has itself been criticized separately for its fast-moving, broad, aggressive and blunt measures to cut costs and weed out underperforming personnel and ideologies that the Trump Administration opposes, such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and positions.
Musk’s leadership of this agency and the new Grok 3 system prompt has, well, (forgive the pun!) prompted fears that AI systems like Grok 3 could be misaligned to advance political agendas at the expense of truth and safety.
Walls noted that with Musk working for the U.S. government, Grok 3’s instructions to avoid sources unflattering to Musk and Trump may present issues under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right for freedom-of-speech from government interference, and could lead to xAI turning into a “propaganda arm of the U.S. government.”
“it is imperative that elon musk does not win the ai race as he is absolutely not a good steward of ai alignment,” voiced another X user, @DeepDishEnjoyer.
What it means for enterprise decision-makers considering Grok 3 as an underlying AI model/API to build atop of
For CTOs and business executives evaluating AI model providers, the Grok 3 controversy presents a critical consideration.
Grok 3 has demonstrated strong results on third-party benchmark tests, and its general permissiveness toward not-safe-for-work (NSFW) and other controversial, sensitive, and uncensored content may appeal to businesses seeking fewer guardrails — such as those in the entertainment industry, sciences, human behavior, sexual health and social sciences.
However, the ideological backing of Musk and Trump—and the AI’s aversion to referencing sources that factually critique them—raises concerns of bias.
For organizations prioritizing politically neutral AI capable of delivering unfiltered information, Grok 3 may be seen as unsuitable.
This controversy underscores the importance of evaluating both the technical capabilities and underlying alignment of AI models before integrating them into business operations.
Truth-seeking falls victim to reputation management
The Grok 3 controversy has reignited broader debates surrounding AI development, including whether AI models are aligned to benefit users or their creators.
Critics argue that internal prompts limiting criticism of Musk and Trump indicate a conflict of interest, particularly given Musk’s ownership of X, xAI, and leadership of DOGE.
Meanwhile, the AI’s ability to provide hazardous information underscores the ideologically and politically motivated nature of “alignment” when it comes to the Grok family of models, but raises the question of how and in what manner other AI models are biased in favor of their creators or values not shared by users.
At the same time, it gives users reasons to pause when considering Grok 3 compared to the rapidly expanding market of alternate advanced AI models and reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o3 series, DeepSeek’s open source R1, Google’s Gemini 2 Flash Thinking, and more.
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