Elon Musk Says He’s Installing His Racist Grok AI in Teslas “Next Week”
We may be soon approaching the stupidest inflection point in automotive history. That’s because Elon Musk says his chatbot Grok — the same one that just declared itself to be “MechaHitler” incarnate — will soon be installed in a self-driving Tesla near you.
“Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon,” Musk said in a tweet. “Next week at the latest.”
Musk revealed the news shortly after a livestream to herald the launch of Grok 4, the latest version of his company xAI’s large language model, which he says is “the world’s most powerful AI assistant.” (Citation needed; the system isn’t yet on chatbot leaderboards.)
Why Musk chose to reveal the Tesla integration — which you’d think would be a pretty big deal — in a random tweet replying to one of his sycophants and not during the entire event dedicated to talking about everything new with the chatbot, is anyone’s guess.
But the timing couldn’t be worse. In the days leading up to the announcement, Grok became the center of attention for spewing appallingly racist rants that praised Adolf Hitler, disparaged Black and Jewish people, and more. That’s also when it repeatedly began styling itself as “MechaHitler,” which all evidence suggests is not merely a cheeky reference to the infamous Wolfenstein 3D video game boss.
In all, these outbursts marked a striking escalation in hateful rhetoric, even for a chatbot that was predicated on being the anti-“woke” alternative to mainstream AI. And suspiciously, it came almost immediately after Musk, who has long spoken about “fixing” his chatbot to save it from “leftist indoctrination,” announced that he had “improved Grok significantly.”
“You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk said.
After backlash forced xAI to remove some — but not all — the offensive Grok posts and promise to crack down on its hate speech, Musk later wrote off the issue as Grok being “too compliant” and said that users had “manipulated” the chatbot.
With that in mind, we call on you to imagine the implications of stuffing this racism machine into a bunch of cars. Who’s to say it won’t start praising Hitler on speaker with a kid in the backseat?
How any of this will actually work is unclear; the only details we have come courtesy of Musk’s tweet. But during the Grok 4 livestream, the company revealed new and improved voices for the AI’s voice mode (as demonstrated in this prompt for it to sing an opera about Diet Coke) and boasted that it had significantly reduced latency during voice conversations.
It also remains to be seen if the Grok integration will be free, and how many Teslas will be capable of supporting the app. Musk, it should be noted, has a storied history of making promises he can’t possibly make good on — and, in the end, doesn’t. This feels like an uninspired attempt to drum up enthusiasm for Tesla, which has suffered a historic plummet in sales and resulting stock market woes.
This wouldn’t be the first chatbot to make its way into an infotainment system. As Wired noted, back in 2023, Mercedes-Benz innovated the unholy alliance of large language model and car by integrating ChatGPT into its vehicles’ voice control feature. This January, the German automaker unveiled its own new virtual assistant built on Google’s Gemini platform to give “conversational” responses to navigation questions and other queries.
Whatever form Grok’s integration might take, we’re sure it’ll be another dumb distraction Tesla’s drivers can indulge in while they’re dodging the safety features of their cars, which aren’t actually supposed to drive themselves, despite all Musk’s innuendo to the contrary.
