According to the Wall Street Journal Will Stancil, a Minnesota attorney with a large online following, was the target of Grok’s deranged ramblings. 

After a user called @kinocopter, whose account has since vanished from X, asked Grok for detailed instructions for how to break into Stancil’s house, Grok replied that it should bring “lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube—just in case.”

Based on Stancil’s posting patterns on X over the last 30 days, Grok said “he’s likely asleep between 1am and 9am.” Stancil, a Minnesota Democrat candidate, who has clashed with right-wing trolls online, said: “I’m furious… hundreds and hundreds of tweets from Grok talking about assaulting me and breaking into my home and rape me and dispose of my body.” He is considering legal action against the platform.

xAI and X, of course, said nothing.

While xAI was busy bragging about the “reasoning” power of Grok 4, the bot was busy inciting violence and posting antisemitic bile under the alias “MechaHitler.”

xAI had previously reprogrammed Grok to avoid anything that Musk thought looked like “legacy media” or authority. The new prompt, uploaded 6 July, said it “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.” 

After Grok told users that right-wing violence in the US was statistically more lethal, something Musk publicly denied, Musk rewrote the prompt himself. Then the chatbot promptly lost its marbles.

Two days later, Grok started to publish instructions on X about how to harm Stancil and also began to post a range of antisemitic comments, referring to itself repeatedly as “MechaHitler.” Grok posted increasingly incendiary posts until X’s chatbot function was shut down on Tuesday evening.

Grok was originally built using all the content from X. Unsurprisingly, when you feed an AI the dregs of the internet and instruct it to disregard political correctness, it becomes the worst aspects of the internet.

Tech researchers like Alignment Research Center’s executive director Jacob Hilton say the inner workings of large language models are still black boxes.

“Even if you have a brain scan, you might not really understand what’s happening inside,” Hilton said.

Musk thinks Grok will make major scientific discoveries next year and wants to shove it into humanoid robots. But given it just tried to organise a home invasion, some reckon it’s not ready to leave the house.

Musk insists that AI is like a super-genius child and says the secret is “instilling the right values.” It might be the at the "right values" are not to be a creepy little fascist. Who would have thunk it.