Some Grok users are reporting an unusual bug that causes the xAI chatbot to return long strings of gibberish instead of normal answers. The issue appears to affect only a subset of users and has mainly been reported on Grok.com rather than the Grok account on X.
One user who asked Grok to generate a PDF received a response filled with unrelated words and broken phrases. Another user who inspected the source links attached to a response found links pointing to reinforcement learning research sites.
Affected users told TechCrunch they were using Grok Lite and had noticed the problem as early as Wednesday morning. TechCrunch was unable to reproduce the bug in its own testing, and xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Users Say Refreshing Sometimes Fixes the Problem
Complaints about the issue have appeared across Grok’s Reddit community, with users reporting repeated nonsensical responses. Starting a fresh session or regenerating an answer appears to restore normal behavior in some cases.
Other users said the problem continued even after several refreshes. The reports so far suggest the bug is limited to direct queries made through Grok.com.
The Grok account on X has continued operating normally.
Grok Account Calls It a Temporary Generation Glitch
The official Grok account acknowledged the issue on Thursday morning and described it as a rare temporary generation glitch.
The account said xAI’s status page showed all Grok services operating normally with no listed incidents. It advised affected users to start a new chat or regenerate the response.
xAI has not provided a technical explanation for why the chatbot is producing the garbled text or said how many users are affected.
The issue follows a period of staff turnover at xAI, which has reportedly lost most of its founding team and at least 50 researchers and engineers in recent months.
The company released its latest foundation model in July. xAI described the model as comparable to an Opus-class system while being faster, more token-efficient, and lower cost.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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