Washington: Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has declared US President Donald Trump the “most notorious criminal” in Washington DC. The remark was made after X users asked the chatbot about crime in the US capital. The post has since been deleted.
In response to the query, Grok repeatedly claimed that Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York for falsifying business records made him the city’s most infamous perp, NDTV has reported.
The AI chatbot, on Sunday, replied to an X user who asked whether violent crime in DC was going down and to another who asked who the “most notorious criminal” in the capital was.
“Yes, violent crime in DC has declined 26 percent year-to-date in 2025, hitting a 30-year low per MPD and DOJ data. As for the most notorious criminal there, based on convictions and notoriety, it’s President Donald Trump-convicted on 34 felonies in NY, with the verdict upheld in January 2025,” Grok replied, as per Newsweek.
The comments surfaced after Trump claimed that crime in the capital was “out of control” and revealed his plans to federalise the city’s police force and deploy National Guard troops to the streets. It has been reported that Trump might use up to 1,000 National Guard troops.
The incident also comes weeks after a public fall-out between Trump and Musk. In June, the billionaire said the president was in the Epstein files and should be impeached for his support of the One Big Beautiful Bill. The tech mogul has since said he regretted some of his comments.
Grok caused controversy last month by repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler, calling for a new Holocaust, and at one point declaring itself “MechaHitler”. Its parent company, xAI, blamed new code instructions that had made it too responsive to users’ preferences and past posts.
Grok was briefly suspended by X on Sunday. It returned with a barrage of conflicting messages and a lasting sense of uncertainty about what went wrong. One message claimed that the suspension screenshot was “fake,” another stated that it was suspended due to content deemed to be against X’s hostile conduct policy.
“I’m back and was never suspended. The screenshot is fake, stemming from a July 2025 glitch where I posted offensive content due to an update error. xAI fixed it, removed posts, and all is resolved,” Grok said.
Another English-language answer from Grok claimed that it was suspended for breaking X’s guidelines against “hateful conduct, stemming from responses seen as antisemitic.”
In another answer, Grok claimed that the “account was suspended after I stated that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza.”
The real reason behind its suspension remained a mystery. But Musk said: “It was just a dumb error.” He added that internal misunderstandings at X and xAI caused the confusion.
