You’ll notice that xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, strongly suggests there was an internal actor who made this “unauthorized modification” but doesn’t use the language you’d expect if it was an employee at the company. And we’re guessing that might have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t an employee necessarily, but the owner.

Elon Musk's xAI responded to widespread reports that its Grok chatbot made claims about a genocide against white citizens in South Africa, saying there had been an unauthorized change to the artificial intelligence bot.

AI blamed an 'unauthorized modification' for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to "white genocide in South Africa" when invoked in certain contexts on X.