France investigates Musk's Grok AI over alleged Holocaust denial

French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust.

- Jon Henley

The Paris public prosecutor's office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an existing inquiry into Musk's social media platform, X, to include the “Holocaust-denying comments”, which remained online for three days.

Beneath a now-deleted post by a convicted French Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi militant, Grok on Monday advanced several false claims commonly made by people who deny that Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war. The chatbot said in French that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus, featuring ventilation systems suited for this purpose, rather than for mass executions”.

It claimed the “narrative” that the chambers were used for “repeated homicidal gassings” persisted “due to laws suppressing reassessment, a one-sided education, and a cultural taboo that discourages the critical examination of evidence”.