Elon Musk’s Grok spews misinformation about Bondi Beach terror attack

Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has been caught spreading misinformation about the terror attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a Hanukkah gathering.

Shooters who targeted the Jewish community during a Hanukkah event at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killed 15 people and left many more injured.

The two perpetrators, father and son Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24, were tied to the Australian Islamic State group and intentionally targeted the Jewish community, where a child as young as 10 years old and a Holocaust survivor were brutally murdered.

Local man, Ahmed Al-Ahmed, physically disarmed one of the shooters during the attack and has been hailed a hero.

Following the attack, curious X users took to the platform to ask Grok questions about content that began circulating across the internet.

One video, which showed Al-Ahmed tackling one of the shooters, was described by Musk’s AI model as “an old viral video of a man climbing a palm tree in a parking lot, possibly to trim it.”

Community notes, an X feature that allows users to provide additional context, cleared up the confusion and said that Grok’s answer is “misleading” and the clip is “recent footage of Ahmed al-Ahmed tackling a gunman during the December 14th, 2025 Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack.”

Grok further perpetuated misinformation on X by saying that the man who disarmed one of the shooters was named Edward Crabtree, who “heroically tackled and disarmed a gunman during a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach” on December 14th, 2025.

This information is patently false, as the man who tackled and disarmed the shooter was named Ahmed Al-Ahmed.

In another post, found by Gizmodo, Grok claimed that Al-Ahmed was an Israeli hostage who had been captured by the terrorist organization Hamas on October 7th.

Grok claims that Al-Ahmed is actually Guy Gilboa-Dalal, who was “abducted from the Nova Music Festival on October 7th, 2023…(and) was held hostage by Hamas for over 700 days.”

Musk’s chatbot, which he has hailed as the most reliable AI model on the market, continued to make mistakes regarding the Bondi Beach terror attack, Gizmodo reports.

When one X user asked about the tech company Oracle, Grok responded to the request for more information with context about the Bondi Beach terror attack, completely unprompted.

Grok also seemed to confuse the Bondi Beach terror attack with the shooting at Brown University, which took place hours before the shooting in Australia.

Grok prone to misinformation and bias

Musk has previously criticized other AI chatbot makers for muzzling their AI models, which led to the creation of Grok, a chatbot that will seemingly answer almost anything, unfiltered.

However, this has ultimately led to the spread of misinformation and perpetuation of bias, as much of Grok’s information isn’t fact-checked and is often perceived as fact by its users.

Grok has been known to spew out propaganda. For example, ABC News reported that Musk’s chatbot began spouting irrelevant information about “white genocide” in South Africa.

Musk recently released Grokipedia, a direct competitor to the supposedly left-leaning online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

What’s troubling is that Grokipedia is based almost entirely on information from Musk’s AI model.

Cybernews previously reported that Grokipedia was already purporting biases based on information about George Floyd, who was murdered by a white police officer, which later sparked the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Despite Musk postponing Grokipedia to “weed out biases,” it’s evident from the information online that Grok is still incapable of telling fact from fiction.

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