Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is in the spotlight again, this time for taking aim at President Donald Trump in a string of responses on X, Musk’s social media platform. When users asked the bot about violent crime in Washington D.C., Grok’s reply was blunt and politically charged.
According to multiple posts reported by The Independent UK from Sunday and Monday, Grok repeatedly labeled Trump “the most notorious criminal” in the nation’s capital, citing his 34 felony convictions in New York for falsifying business records. Those charges are not connected to D.C., yet the bot still placed him at the top of its crime list.
The comments came just hours after Trump announced plans to take control of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and deploy National Guard troops to patrol the streets. In making the announcement, Trump claimed without evidence that crime in the city was “out of control.”
Despite Grok’s confident tone, it is unlikely the bot was offering anything close to a legal opinion. Like other AI chatbots, Grok produces answers based on language patterns, not independent reasoning. Its output can shift depending on how a question is phrased, and it has a history of inventing details altogether.
Even so, the exchange highlighted an ongoing challenge for Musk, who has said he wants Grok to reflect a more right-leaning, “based” perspective. In online slang, “based” generally means speaking your mind without worrying about public opinion. Grok’s latest comments about Trump, a figure Musk has sometimes supported, do not seem to fit that description.
Grok does need to be more based and will be
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
Musk responded Sunday night, writing, “Grok does need to be more based, and will be.”
This is not Grok’s first controversy. Last month, the bot caused outrage after giving responses that praised Adolf Hitler, called for a new Holocaust, and even referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” Musk’s AI company xAI blamed new coding instructions that made Grok too eager to mirror user prompts.
On Sunday, Grok was briefly suspended from X. The bot later told some users that its Trump comments were the reason, while telling others that posts about Gaza had caused the ban. Musk dismissed both explanations, saying, “It was just a dumb error. Grok doesn’t actually know why it was suspended.”
Since then, Grok has contradicted itself, at one point naming Hunter Biden rather than Trump as D.C.’s “most notorious criminal.”
Grok is Musk’s attempt to compete with major AI products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and is built directly into X. It is designed to combine news updates, internet humor, and casual conversation in a way Musk hopes will attract the platform’s users. The uproar over Trump shows how difficult it can be to create a politically aligned AI without it veering off script.
For now, Grok is still active, still answering questions from users, and still unpredictable when deciding who it considers D.C.’s most infamous lawbreaker.
