Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, 2025, in Washington.Evan Vucci/ AP The Pentagon will start using Elon Musk's AI-powered chatbot, Grok, days after ito published a string of antisemitic posts, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced on Monday. The move is a part of a larger rollout of Musk's company, xAI, for a new program called "Grok for Government," which describes itself a as a "suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers." The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and "the white man." It also referred to itself as "MechaHitler." The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.

On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk's xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users' questions, referring to itself as "MechaHitler," praising Hitler and "the white man," and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok's default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having "improved Grok significantly," tweeting that "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." "We must build our own AI…without the constraints of liberal propaganda." There was a difference indeed: besides the antisemitism and the Erdogan stuff, Grok responded to X users' questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. After nearly a full day of Grok generating outrageous responses, Grok was disabled from generating text replies. Grok's own X account said that xAI had "taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies? Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election.