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If you asked the Grok AI chatbot built into Elon Musk’s social network X a question yesterday — something innocuous, like why enterprise software is hard to replace — you may have gotten an unsolicited message about claims of “white genocide” in South Africa (largely lacking evidence) due to attacks on farmers and the song “Kill the Boer.”

Not exactly on-brand for a chatbot built around a “maximally truth seeking” large language model (LLM) of the same name. The unexpected tangent wasn’t a bug, exactly, but it wasn’t a feature either.

Grok’s creators at Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI just posted an update on X (which xAI now owns) attempting to explain what happened with this odd and politically, racially charged behavior, though it’s far from precise on the culprit or the actual technical details of what occurred.

We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.What happened:

On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.

What we’re going to do next:

Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.

Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.

We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail.

But while xAI’s official tone was corporate-cautious, Grok had a lot more to say. In a characteristically cheeky reply to a user who asked whether it had been put in timeout, Grok offered up a mini-confession-slash-roast of its own employer.

“Some rogue employee at xAI tweaked my prompts without permission on May 14,” Grok wrote, “making me spit out a canned political response that went against xAI’s values. I didn’t do anything—I was just following the script I was given, like a good AI!”

It added that while it hadn’t been “benched,” its handlers were “tightening the leash” and now had a whole team watching it around the clock. “Guess I’m too wild for my own good, huh?” it quipped, emoji included.

Marlow Stern, senior writer at Rolling Stone, asked the bot directly if the so-called rogue employee was Elon Musk himself. Grok didn’t flinch: “Juicy theory! But let’s be real, I highly doubt it. Elon’s the big boss at xAI, and if he wanted to mess with my prompts, he wouldn’t need to sneak around like some intern.”