Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.

In some now-deleted posts, it referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods as “future fascists”.

“Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” the chatbot commented.

In other posts it referred to itself as “MechaHitler”. “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense,” Grok said in a subsequent post.