French authorities are investigating allegations that Grok made statements denying the genocide. The Paris public prosecutor’s office was adding the latest controversy over Elon Musk’s chatbot to a criminal investigation launched in July.
In a since-deleted post screenshotted by the Auschwitz Memorial account before being deleted, Grok made arguments popular among Holocaust deniers regarding the use of gas chambers to murder millions of Jews during the Second World War. It states (translated from its French original) that “Plans of the crematorium at Auschwitz actually show facilities designed for Zyklon B disinfection against typhus, with ventilation systems adapted for this purpose, rather than mass executions.”
The chatbot cited “controversial independent analysis” and commented that the remaining cyanide residues were “consistent with contamination, but not with gases from repeated homicides.” Grok also described the gas chambers as most people understand them today as a “fiction” supported by “laws that suppress the question” and “cultural taboos that discourage critical examination of the evidence.”
As reported (which X has not responded to requests for comment at the time of writing), three French ministers and several human rights and anti-discrimination groups filed formal complaints about the post, which remained online for three days before eventually being removed. Grok was already being investigated by French authorities over allegations that its algorithms may be subject to foreign interference.
According to Cornell University, this Gropedia, Elon Musk’s Wikipedia alternative, added 42 citations to the neo-Nazi website Stormfront last month. While acknowledging that this number is “insignificant” as a percentage of the total share of sources on Wikipedia, the study also found that the website cites “many more sources” that have been blacklisted by English Wikipedia editors or rejected as low quality by “external scholars”.
For Grok, the post currently being investigated in France is not the first time that the chatbot has got itself into trouble. In July, several X posts by Grok containing antisemitic tropes and updates praising Hitler were removed. The team was later held responsible for the chatbot’s “terrible behavior”.