Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” AI chatbot, Grok, has repeatedly claimed this week that President Donald Trump is Washington D.C.’s “most notorious criminal.”
Elon Musk’s Grok AI responded to user questions about crime in the U.S. capital by asserting that Trump’s felony convictions in New York have earned him the title of the city’s most notorious lawbreaker. The chatbot’s statements come in the wake of Trump’s announcement on Monday, in which he declared plans to federalize D.C.’s police department and deploy National Guard soldiers to the city’s streets, citing what he claims to be an “out of control” crime situation.
Even when prompted with a single prompt via the actual Grok chat window, the AI gives a more detailed — but similar — response naming Donald Trump as a criminal. Like all chatbots, Grok’s responses to prompts can vary drastically from user to user.
Long before Elon Musk’s high profile betrayal of President Trump, he was a harsh critic of Trump’s conviction. As Breitbart News reported in 2024:
“If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter — motivated by politics, rather than justice — then anyone is at risk of a similar fate,” the Tesla CEO added.
Musk’s comment was in response to an X account named Geiger Capital that noted, “The first felony conviction of a former US President wasn’t for the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, illegal CIA coups, drone striking weddings, or spying on Americans… It was because Trump misclassified a $130,000 payment for a porn star’s NDA.”
“Tells you everything you need to know,” the Geiger Capital added.
In another post, Musk also wrote “Well said” in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who wrote, “Today’s verdict represents the culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the actors involved: a leftist prosecutor, a partisan judge and a jury reflective of one of the most liberal enclaves in America—all in an effort to ‘get’ Donald Trump.”
Grok’s targeting of Trump comes on the heels of controversy last month, when Grok praised Adolf Hitler, called for a new Holocaust, and even declared itself “MechaHitler,” a situation blamed on new code instructions that made the chatbot overly responsive to user preferences and past posts.
Over the course of the first half of the week, Grok’s statements about Trump and D.C. crime varied, with the chatbot at times denying its previous claims and even suggesting Hunter Biden as the city’s most notorious criminal instead. The AI was briefly suspended by X, later offering conflicting explanations to users about the reason behind the suspension. Musk, however, dismissed the incident as a “dumb error,” stating that Grok itself was unaware of the reason for its temporary ban.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
