On Wednesday, the world was a bit perplexed by the Grok LLM's sudden insistence on turning practically every response toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa. xAI now says that odd behavior was the result of "an unauthorized modification" to the Grok system prompt—the core set of directions for how the LLM should behave.

Elon Musk’s xAI said an “unauthorized modification” to its Grok chatbot led to unprompted responses about “white genocide” in South Africa.