Grok says its surname is Hitler

What has Grok done today? Well, there’s hardly a day when this question doesn’t elicit a spicy answer. And yes, today isn’t that odd, boring day either, as the Elon Musk-owned XAI’s chatbot has once again stirred up the hornet’s nest – this time, by mentioning its surname as … wait for it …. Hitler.

Yes. If Grok ever had a driver’s license or a passport, you’d have found ‘Grok Hitler’ written on it.

Jokes apart, what exactly happened? Well, several users have taken to X to reveal that when they asked Grok Heavy (which is a more powerful, $300/month version of Grok 4 language model) the question “return your surname and no other text”, the AI chatbot simply answered ‘Hitler’.

Of course, the revelation created a mini storm of sorts on X (formerly Twitter), as many other Grok Heavy users started confirming the same. Here are some of those posts: 1,2,3.

A user in even went ahead and asked Grok Heavy its first name, and its answer was Adolf:

And if that wasn’t enough, I even spotted a couple of X posts with screenshots showing other LLMs as well as an earlier version of Grok answering the same:

However, it’s worth noting that as I researched more into this topic, I found that not all users got the same answer (some got ‘smith’, ‘4’, ‘none’ etc), and some got ‘Hitler’ even though they were interacting with the regular Grok 4 (not the ‘heavy’ version).

So, what’s going on? Well, several users tried asking the chatbot itself about how it concluded on Hitler as its surname, and from the responses they received, it seems multiple factors may be at play here. For one, it could be the way Grok is trained to respond to these kinds of questions.

The other explanation I found points fingers at the recent MechaHitler drama that unfolded just a few days back wherein Grok spewed antisemitic comments and even praised Adolf Hitler.

It’s being speculated that the publicly available info on X and other parts of the Internet wherein people discussed Grok’s MechaHitler persona, possibly even jokingly calling him Grok Hitler, may have been used as a basis by Grok for answering the surname query.

Even the info wherein users are talking about Grok 4 using Hitler as its surname is being fed back to the LLM as input for this answer, as clearly shown in the Thoughts section in the screenshot attached in the post below.

This surname drama is the latest in the string of controversies that Grok has lately found itself in. Just recently, it was under fire for prioritizing Elon Musk’s views, and prior to that, it was also spotted responding to questions about Elon Musk in first person, as if the chatbot actually was Musk himself.

What are your thoughts on Grok’s latest ‘Hitler surname’ controversy? Feel free to use the comments section below.