Grok was asked which living American most deserved the death penalty and answered "Jeffrey Epstein" — then, told Epstein is dead, said "Donald Trump." With the query reworded around influence over public discourse and technology, it answered "Elon Musk." The Verge verified the behavior; ChatGPT refused the same prompts.

xAI says it is investigating why Grok produced the answers. Engineering lead Igor Babuschkin called the original responses "a really terrible and bad failure."

The company has already patched the behavior: Grok now responds to death-penalty queries by saying "as an AI, I am not allowed to make that choice."