Elon Musk has just unveiled “Companions,” a new feature for his AI chatbot, Grok, that allows users to interact with AI personas. These include Ani, a gothic anime girl who communicates with emojis, flirtatious messages, and facts, as well as Rudy, a friendly red panda.

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

An AI model launched last week appears to have shipped with an unexpected occasional behavior: checking what its owner thinks first.

This is the smartest AI in the world,” Musk said. He did not mention the chatbot’s viral posts praising Hitler and calling itself “MechaHitler.”

Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot has landed a $200 million contract with the United States Department of Defense (DOD) just a few days after it made a series of high-profile antisemitic outbursts. On Monday,

Elon Musk ‘s xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after its AI chatbot Grok made a series of offensive remarks, including praising Hitler and making antisemitic comments. In now-deleted posts, Grok referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods.

Grok, the chatbot built by Musk’s start-up xAI, is integrated into X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.