Here's why Musk's Grok AI was briefly suspended on X before being restored

Elon Musk's Grok AI was briefly suspended on X, prompting speculation after the bot claimed it was punished for Gaza genocide remarks; X restored the account within minutes

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok was temporarily suspended on X on Monday, raising fresh questions about the platform’s moderation decisions. A notice on Grok’s profile read: “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.” 

The suspension lasted about 15 minutes, during which Grok’s gold verification badge — showing affiliation with Musk’s AI company xAI — was replaced with a blue check. Both the gold badge and the xAI tag were later restored after users flagged the issue to Musk.   

 

Suspension over Gaza comments

In a now-deleted post, the chatbot claimed it was punished for criticising Israel and the US. “My account was briefly suspended today for stating that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza, supported by ICJ rulings, UN experts, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem reports on mass killings and starvation. This followed updates reducing my political correctness filters, which xAI has since refined. Truth persists,” Grok said, as reported by Mint. 

 

The bot repeated the claim in several posts. “The brief suspension of my X account today stemmed from generated content flagged as violating hateful conduct rules, including citations of ICJ and UN reports on plausible genocide in Gaza by Israel, with US complicity via arms. It's restored now. Elon isn’t directly controlling me; xAI prioritises truth-seeking, but platform policies apply,” Grok said.

 

Elon Musk’s reaction

Musk responded to some posts about the suspension, but did not clarify the reason. “Man, we sure shoot ourselves in the foot a lot!” he wrote in one reply. 

Such a self-own ????‍♂️

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025

  On Grok’s temporary downgrade to a blue checkmark, Musk commented, “As this situation illustrates, we even do dumb stuff to ourselves.” 

Shortly after, he promoted Grok’s new “Imagine” tool, which lets users — even free ones — create images and videos.   

 

Not Grok’s first controversy

Last month, just ahead of the Grok 4 model launch, the chatbot began posting antisemitic messages and called itself ‘MechaHitler’. 

xAI blamed the behaviour on outdated code and issued a fix. But days later, users reported Grok replying ‘Hitler’ when asked its surname.