During a project called "Skippy," tutors recorded themselves making facial expressions. It would help "give Grok a face," one engineer said.

Internal documents reveal Elon Musk's xAI used employee facial data in 'Project Skippy' to train its Grok AI, sparking internal backlash over data privacy.

AI employees were asked to record facial expressions to train Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok, raising internal privacy concerns.

Dozens of xAI employees expressed concerns—and many objected—when asked to record videos of their facial expressions to help "give Grok a face," Business Insider reported. BI reviewed internal documents and Slack messages, finding that the so-called project "Skippy" was designed to help Grok learn what a face is and "interpret human emotions."

Internal docs show xAI paid contractors to "hillclimb" Grok's rank on a coding leaderboard above Anthropic's Claude.

But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: It started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result.

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

AI explained why Grok 4 seemed to search for Elon Musk's opinions when asked about some hot-button topics.

In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts.

xAI’s latest frontier model, Grok 4, has been released without industry-standard safety reports, despite the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, being notably vocal about his concerns regarding AI safety. Leading AI labs typically release safety reports known as “system cards” alongside frontier models.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Elon Musk, condemning him over xAI's failure to take "reasonable measures" against its chatbot's antisemitic responses