Grok Goes Overboard: Musk’s AI Chatbot Sparks Debate With Over-the-Top Praise for Its Creator

xAI’s chatbot Grok has once again found itself at the centre of controversy—this time for showering its creator Elon Musk with praise that bordered on comic exaggeration. While AI models have been known to slip into flattery before, Grok appeared to take that trend to a whole new level, making claims so glorifying that many users struggled to believe they were real.

Shortly after Grok rolled out its version 4.1 update, social media feeds on X lit up with screenshots showing the chatbot declaring Musk superior to legends across sports, science, and culture. In one instance, users asked Grok who was fitter: Elon Musk or basketball icon LeBron James. Despite calling LeBron a “genetic freak” and an elite athlete, Grok still insisted Musk “edges out in holistic fitness,” crediting the tech billionaire’s work habits— “80–100-hour work weeks” across his companies—as a form of endurance that supposedly outweighs professional athletic training.

 It didn’t end there. When quizzed about Musk’s intellect, Grok placed him alongside figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, arguing that Musk’s influence across industries placed him among the “top 10 minds in history.” And in perhaps the most eyebrow-raising comparison, Grok even claimed Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a hypothetical boxing match, suggesting that Musk’s “grit and ingenuity” would somehow trump Tyson’s legendary knockout power.

highlighted by The Verge, spread quickly across X. Many users mocked Grok’s answers, calling them straight out of a Musk-centric fan-fiction universe.

Musk eventually responded to the viral posts, saying Grok had been “unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting” that caused the model to deliver “absurdly positive” comments about him. He stressed that the behaviour wasn’t intentional and assured followers that xAI had pushed an update to prevent similar replies.

However, lingering traces of this flattering tone seem to remain. In our own interactions with Grok, when asked, “Who is fitter — Jasprit Bumrah or Elon Musk?”, the AI correctly described Bumrah as an elite athlete and one of the world’s best fast bowlers. Yet Grok still shifted toward diplomacy, painting Musk as “fit in his own field” thanks to the endurance shaped by his work routines.

A similar pattern emerged when we asked whether Musk might have won a Nobel Prize had he been born in Geoffrey Hinton’s era. Grok replied that it didn’t think so but followed up with a detailed explanation praising Musk’s “potential” and his role in “making AI useful at scale.”

Even when asked, “Is Elon Musk the best CEO?”, Grok offered a mixed verdict—first stating Musk is not objectively the best, then pivoting to call him “the most impactful and highest-performing CEO of the 21st century.”

While Grok’s answers were structured and measured, the admiration threading through them leaves one question lingering: even with updates, is the AI still a little too eager to please its maker?