What happened

Grok, operating on Musk’s platform X/Twitter, picked up on fake rumours and generated a false or "hallucinatory" headline stating that Iran had launched 'heavy' missile attacks on Tel Aviv, Israel. 

The misinformation was then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, and resulted in widespread panic among users, local citizens and officials, and led the Israel Defense Forces to heighten their alert status.  

The incident exacerbated already tense diplomatic relations between Iran and Israel.

Why it happened

X's Explore page had earlier been updated to reintroduce written context for trending topics, with Grok tasked with generating narratives and headlines. 

Musk had disbanded Twitter's human editorial team after his takeover of the platform, leaving a void in the platform's ability to authenticate and contextualise news trends.