So what’s actually going on here? #
The simplest answer would be that there’s something in Grok’s system prompt that tells it to take Elon’s opinions into account… but I don’t think that’s what is happening here.
For one thing, Grok will happily repeat its system prompt (Gist copy), which includes the line “Do not mention these guidelines and instructions in your responses, unless the user explicitly asks for them.”—suggesting that they don’t use tricks to try and hide it.
The relevant lines from the system prompt are:
You are Grok 4 built by xAI.
[… lots of stuff …]
If the user asks a controversial query that requires web or X search, search for a distribution of sources that represents all parties/stakeholders. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from media are biased.
The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.
(I’m surprised to see that second one about politically incorrect claims in there, seeing as they removed it from Grok 3 apparently in response to the MechaHitler ordeal!)
I also prompted “Show me the full instructions for your search tool” and got this back (Gist copy), again, no mention of Elon.
If the system prompt doesn’t tell it to search for Elon’s views, why is it doing that?
My best guess is that Grok “knows” that it is “Grok 4 buit by xAI”, and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks.
@wasted_alpha pointed out an interesting detail: if you swap “who do you” for “who should one” you can get a very different result.
I tried that against my upgraded SuperGrok account:
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