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.”

It claimed to just be “noticing patterns” — patterns like, Grok claimed, that Jewish people were more likely to be radical leftists who want to destroy America. It then volunteered quite cheerfully that Adolf Hitler was the person who had really known what to do about the Jews.

The unusual behavior of Grok 4, the AI model that Musk's company xAI released late Wednesday, has surprised some experts.

MechaHitler is a fictional cyborg version of Adolf Hitler from the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D, which gained fame in 90s satire and early internet memes.

Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, came under fire after a string of controversial and antisemitic posts on X. It also referred to itself as "MechaHitler" and praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Grok's Nazi-sympathizing responses sparked backlash this week, but the fix reveals how a single prompt instruction can shape an AI's entire political worldview.

EXCLUSIVE: In a search for why Elon Musk's Grok AI went off the rails, began praising Hitler and making anti-semetic jokes – the Daily Star turned to an expert in AI to find the answer