Grok searches for Elon Musk’s opinion before answering tough questions
The latest version of Grok — dubbed a “maximally truth-seeking” AI by owner Elon Musk — is answering controversial questions by first searching for what Musk has said on the matter. Multiple reports show that Grok will specifically look for Elon Musk’s stance across the web and his social media posts when asked questions around topics like Israel and Palestine, US immigration, and abortion. It’s unclear if this is by design or not.
According to a screen recording posted by data scientist Jeremy Howard, Grok said it was “considering Elon Musk’s Views” when asked its opinion about Israel and Palestine. Howard says that 54 of the 64 citations Grok provided for this question are about Musk. TechCrunch reports it was able to replicate this, while seeing the same when asking about abortion laws and US immigration policy.
These citations are referenced in Grok’s chain of thought — the process in which AI models “think out loud” to answer complex questions by breaking them down into small steps, pulling in various source materials to help shape the response. Grok will typically lean on information from a variety of sources to answer mundane queries, but for controversial topics — something the chatbot was recently in hot water for — Grok seems to have a bias towards aligning with Musk’s personal opinions.
Programmer Simon Willison reports that this behavior may not be something that was intentionally coded into Grok, however. Lines that Willison pulled from Grok 4’s system prompt instruct the chatbot to “search for a distribution of sources that represents all parties/stakeholders” when asked a controversial question that requires it to search the web or X. It also warns Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from media are biased,” which would explain its aversion to using them.
“My best guess is that Grok ‘knows’ that it is ‘Grok 4 built by xAI,’ and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks,” Willison said in his blog.