By Rajwa Quasim
xAI’s Grok chatbot has been sending bizarre and nonsensical responses to some users, leaving them confused. Elon Musk’s AI company said the issue was caused by a technical glitch.
The issue was reported by some users who said the Grok chatbot was producing strings of unrelated words instead of meaningful answers to their questions. In one example, a user asked Grok to generate a PDF but received several paragraphs containing random phrases unrelated to the request, with words that did not form coherent sentences. The response began with “match it without and your they and two for planets can practical and often cheese…”
READ: Elon Musk says Grok can earn users money (August 20, 2026)
The issue was reported in Grok Lite as early as Aug. 19. No similar reports emerged from Grok accounts operating within the X platform. The company issued a statement on Thursday, saying, “That pure word salad is a rare temporary generation glitch. Official status at https://status.x.ai shows all Grok services fully operational with no incidents. Start a fresh chat or regenerate—it usually clears right away. Sorry about the gibberish.”
Some users reported that the gibberish responses continued even after refreshing the page. Complaints on the Grok subreddit included a reply to the word “balls” that began, “app scale designs with that and to your horse choose batch,” while another response said, “people stable stage right professional on steel.”
TechCrunch was unable to reproduce the issue in its own testing.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February and renamed the combined company SpaceXAI earlier this month. According to The Information, the company has been losing top talent since the merger. At least 50 researchers and engineers have departed since February, including key leaders in coding, world models and Grok voice.
READ: Woman sues xAI over Grok-generated abuse images (August 16, 2026)
In July, the company released its most recent foundation model, describing it as “an Opus-class model with faster and more token efficient at lower cost.”
Grok has long faced allegations over its potential to produce harmful sexualized images and video content. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, it opened formal investigations into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) and X.AI LLC (X.AI) in February. The statement said, “The reported creation and circulation of such content raises serious concerns under UK data protection law and presents a risk of significant potential harm to the public.
These concerns relate to whether personal data has been processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, and whether appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment to prevent the generation of harmful manipulated images using personal data.”