France Has Beef With Musk's Grok Over Auschwitz Posts

France's government is taking action against billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok after it generated French-language posts that questioned the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, officials said. Grok, built by Musk's company xAI and integrated into his social media platform X, wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for "disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus" rather than for mass murder—language long associated with Holocaust denial, per the AP. The Auschwitz Memorial highlighted the exchange on X, saying that the response distorted historical fact and violated the platform's rules.

In later posts on its X account, the chatbot acknowledged that its earlier reply to an X user was wrong, said it had been deleted, and pointed to historical evidence that Auschwitz's gas chambers using Zyklon B were used to murder more than 1 million people. The follow-ups weren't accompanied by any clarification from X. In tests run by the AP on Friday, Grok's responses to questions about Auschwitz appeared to give historically accurate information.

Grok has a history of making antisemitic comments. Earlier this year, Musk's company took down posts from the chatbot that appeared to praise Adolf Hitler after complaints about such content. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed on Friday that the Holocaust-denial comments have been added to an existing cybercrime investigation into X. The case was opened earlier this year after French officials raised concerns that the platform's algorithm could be used for foreign interference.

France has one of Europe's toughest Holocaust denial laws. Contesting the reality or genocidal nature of Nazi crimes can be prosecuted as a crime, alongside other forms of incitement to racial hatred. French authorities referred the posts to a national police platform for illegal online content and alerted France's digital regulator over suspected breaches of the European Union's Digital Services Act. Two French rights groups, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and SOS Racisme, have filed a criminal complaint accusing Grok and X of contesting crimes against humanity. X and its AI unit, xAI, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. (Grok has a bunch to say about Musk, too.)