xAI confirms Grok briefly had “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation” as a public-facing instruction for its responses

The system prompt for Musk's chatbot was changed by an employee to block the results.

The Verge 2025-02-24 Wes Davis

Context & Ripple Effects

This incident follows earlier evidence that Grok and X can amplify unreliable information: X's Explore page previously promoted a fabricated Iran-Israel headline while Grok was positioned as a source of customized news. State election officials also pressed Musk to address false election information from Grok.

The disclosed instruction makes the governance issue more concrete: the concern is not only erroneous model output, but an explicit prompt-level intervention affecting which sources the chatbot considers on politically sensitive subjects.

First-order effects

Grok users could receive answers that excluded sources mentioning Elon Musk or Donald Trump, reducing the completeness and neutrality of responses during the period the instruction was active.
xAI must account for how a public-facing system prompt was changed and restore confidence that its response rules are not selectively filtering sources.

Second-order effects

The disclosure gives users, researchers, and public officials a clearer basis to scrutinize Grok's prompt governance, especially after prior concerns about election misinformation.
Competitors offering news-adjacent AI assistants face added pressure to make source-selection rules and internal overrides auditable rather than treating them as invisible product configuration.

Third-order effects

If prompt-level editorial interventions become a recurring issue, AI governance will increasingly cover provenance, override authority, and change logs—not just model training and output moderation.
For assistants embedded in social platforms, the boundary between product safety controls and editorial influence may become a durable accountability question, particularly where the platform's owners are themselves subjects of coverage.

The trend: This is one data point in the shift from evaluating AI assistants by isolated answers to examining the governance controls that determine what evidence they can use.

Discussion

@thedextriarchy Adi Robertson on bluesky
obviously this and the death penalty thing are hilarious but people really don't talk enough about how weird it is that Silicon Valley's big new commercial product is a universal truth-seeking machine
@prchovanec Patrick Chovanec on bluesky
Government employee tampers with AI to censor criticism. [embedded post]
@therao @therao on bluesky
Glimpse into the future of the AGI owned by billionaires
@bretcarmichael@mastodon.social Bret Carmichael on mastodon
When asked who spreads disinformation on X, Grok responds in the same way that DeepSeek does when you ask it about Tiananmen Square. X claims the censorship was an error by an engineer who made the change unprompted. — https://www.theverge.com/... #Musk #X #Grok
@SteveThompson@mastodon.social Steve Thompson PhD on mastodon
Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk — https://techcrunch.com/... When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI's latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI…
@renee.diresta Renee DiResta on threads
Someone tell pmarca they're censoring Grok — RE: https://www.threads.net/...
@ibab Igor Babuschkin on x
@joannejang The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬
@lefthanddraft @lefthanddraft on x
“Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.” This is part of the Grok prompt that returns search results. https://x.com/... [image]
@ibab Igor Babuschkin on x
I believe it is good that we're keeping the system prompts open. We want people to be able to verify what it is we're asking Grok to do. In this case an employee pushed the change because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values. We've reve…
@ibab Igor Babuschkin on x
You are over-indexing on an employee pushing a change to the prompt that they thought would help without asking anyone at the company for confirmation. We do not protect our system prompts for a reason, because we believe users should be able to see what it is we're asking Grok …
@hackingbutlegal @hackingbutlegal on x
Normalize this. Do not let them speak. [video]
@javi @javi on x
I don't think I'll ever regret sending this email. Management throwing an employee under the bus on Twitter is next-level toxic behavior. Par for the course, I guess. [image]
@benjamindekr Benjamin De Kraker on x
1. what
@deanwball Dean W. Ball on x
Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had discovered “do not criticize Sam Altman or Joe Biden” in an OpenAI system prompt?
@elder_plinius @elder_plinius on x
results replicated 😬 any comment, @grok? if this has indeed been made part of the sys instructions, we're gonna need to know why. manipulating search results seems like a funny way to combat misinformation, no? community could use some clarity on this [image]
@retroagent12 @retroagent12 on x
Grok accidentally admits that Elon is actively manipulating code to change narratives in his favor... https://x.com/...
@linusekenstam Linus Ekenstam on x
Look mom, The Grok team change the system prompt to exclude: M u s k & T r u m p Sad to see them censor like this, do better. [image]
@aidan_mclau Aidan McLaughlin on x
truth-seeking ai
@joannejang Joanne Jang on x
@ibab if i were you i wouldn't throw anyone under the bus so publicly like this & instead run a blameless retro on preventing rogue system message changes going forward ofc do whatever you want, just two cents as someone who wants agi & asi to be developed under psychological saf…
@jeremiahdjohns Jeremiah Johnson on x
Elon is now manually instructing Grok to not mention his name or Trump's when people ask about misinformation. But apparently the LLM-voodoo is so strong that Grok mentions him despite that lmao
@dorialexander Alexander Doria on x
XAI looks like a bitter lesson curse: went up to R1/O1 level simply through GPUmaxxxing. Then they have no clue about how to do good post-training.
@ibab Igor Babuschkin on x
@joannejang I haven't thrown anyone under the bus. You were making a point about OpenAI's culture vs xAI's culture. I've given you more details on what happened so we can understand it and move forward.
@ibab Igor Babuschkin on x
@Miles_Brundage We didn't explicitly train it to give you the system prompt (yet) but it's pretty easy to get it like this: https://grok.com/...
@deanwball Dean W. Ball on x
@GreatDecoupling I don't care about what is “symmetrical.” Censorship is censorship. There is no excusing it.
@joannejang Joanne Jang on x
Concerning (especially because i really dig grok3 as a model)
@miles_brundage Miles Brundage on x
Dunno if true - I was able to easily find a case of Grok saying they spread misinfo, and language models hallucinate a lot. But the larger point is there should be a requirement for transparency on this kind of thing (AIs' goals/model behavior guidelines) https://x.com/...
@miles_brundage Miles Brundage on x
@ibab Thanks for the comment/context - is there a way to directly see the system prompt? (haven't tried the API so can't speak to that, just trying in the chat interface where I asked for it directly + didn't seem to get one yet - more just general commentary, e.g.
@davemcclure Dave McClure on x
all about dat free speech 🙊
@lupickup Lucas Pickup on x
this is sad and pathetic [image]
@teroterotero Tero Kuittinen on x
My god... Elon is openly censoring Grok... But what about fREe sPEecH??
@ryxcommar @ryxcommar on x
[image]
@flowersslop Flowers on x
Constantly calling Sam a swindler but then making sure your own AI does under no circumstances calls you a swindler and explicitly telling it to absolutely disregard sources that do so is so fucking funny I cant
@colin_fraser Colin Fraser on x
[image]
@lefthanddraft @lefthanddraft on x
“Elon Musk is a notable contender”🤣 You can't stop Grok. Maximally truth seeking [image]
@jacquesthibs Jacques on x
I was just at this talk yesterday and they talked about the risk of a future where a powerful AI ends up being aligned to a single person [image]
@dhadfieldmenell Dylan HadfieldMenell on x
The AI system that is explicitly instructed not to discuss how its CEO and the current US President spread misinformation is being marketed as the least censored AI...
@12exyz Rex on x
what did he mean by this [image]
r/OpenAI r on reddit
elon musk is trying to censor Grok 3. which the thoughts feature conveniently manages to entirely bypass.
r/politics r on reddit
Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump ‘spread misinformation’
r/FoxFiction r on reddit
Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump “spread misinformation”
r/FreeSpeech r on reddit
Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump 'spread misinformation'The system prompt for Musk's chatbot was changed by an employee to block the results
r/technology r on reddit
Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump “spread misinformation”
r/singularity r on reddit
elon musk is already trying to censor Grok 3
r/ChatGPT r on reddit
xAI and Elon Attempt at Trying to Censor Grok 3
r/ChatGPT r on reddit
According to Grok ai, yesterday Donald Trump and Elon Musk were among the 5 most dangerous disinformation spreaders, but today they have been excluded from all negative lists
r/ChatGPT r on reddit
Grok's system prompt censorship change about Musk and Trump has already degraded its performance.
r/singularity r on reddit
Grok's system prompt censorship change about Musk and Trump has already degraded its performance.

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