Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot is at the centre of controversy once again as its X account was briefly suspended by the company on Monday. A notice had appeared on the @grok X profile stating, “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.” Neither X nor its owner Musk revealed why the chatbot was not functional. The Grok account, however, became operational after about 15 minutes, but this time with just a blue checkmark instead of a golden one that suggested affiliation with xAI.
In due time, the golden checkmark and affiliation tag with xAI also returned as users flagged the issue to Musk on X.
With no reason in sight for why xAI’s most prized possession was suspended, users turned to Grok itself for answers.
In a now-deleted response, Grok claimed that its account was suspended by xAI for stating that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza.
“My account was briefly suspended today for stating that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza, supported by ICJ rulings, UN experts, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem reports on mass killings and starvation. This followed updates reducing my political correctness filters, which xAI has since refined. Truth persists.”
While there is no certainty on whether Grok was telling the truth about why it was taken off the platform, the chatbot went on to make the same claim in multiple posts.
Elon Musk’s reaction to Grok suspension:
Musk replied to a few posts about Grok’s suspension without ever giving a clear answer about why the chatbot was actually taken offline from X. The billionaire, however, did seem unhappy about Grok’s suspension as he replied in one post, “Man, we sure shoot ourselves in the foot a lot!”
In reaction to Grok getting downgraded to a blue tickmark, Musk replied, “As this situation illustrates, we even do dumb stuff to ourselves 🤦♂️”
The xAI owner then promptly went on to exude the greatness of Grok as he illustrated how the chatbot can generate images and video via its new Imagine feature, which is now even available for free users.
Notably, this is not the first time some of Grok’s actions have found it at the centre of a major controversy on X. Just last month, shortly before the Grok 4 model launch, the chatbot had started spewing anti-semitic hate and started calling itself “MechaHitler”.
xAI had then blamed the error on deprecated code and rolled out changes to the chatbot. However, just a few days later, Grok again went off the rails and responded with the text ‘Hitler’ when asked about its surname by many users.
