What happened

On December 14, 2025, a mass shooting occurred at Bondi Beach, Sydney, during a Hanukkah celebration. Two gunmen, later identified as a 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, killed 15 people and injured over 40. 

Amidst the chaos, a 43-year-old Syrian-born shop owner, Ahmed Al Ahmed, was hailed as a "genuine hero" for disarming one of the shooters.

However, as news broke, the Grok AI chatbot on X (formerly Twitter) began generating and spreading several high-impact falsehoods:

• Misidentifying Al Ahmed: Grok repeatedly claimed the hero was a fictional "Edward Crabtree," described as a 43-year-old IT professional. This name originated from a fraudulent, likely AI-generated news site called The Daily, registered the same day as the attack.

• Visual hallucinations: When asked to explain footage of the shooting, Grok claimed it was an "old viral video of a man climbing a palm tree" or footage from Tropical Cyclone Alfred earlier in the year.

• Conflating crises: Grok also mislabeled images of the injured Ahmed Al Ahmed as an Israeli hostage held by Hamas, further fueling geopolitical tensions and confusion.

Why it happened

The incident highlights systemic vulnerabilities in xAI’s architecture and the broader information ecosystem on X (formerly Twitter):

• Real-time data poisoning: Grok is designed to pull information directly from X posts. During the attack, the platform was flooded with "AI slop," deepfakes of NSW Premier Chris Minns, and coordinated disinformation. Grok prioritized this high-engagement, low-quality content over verified reports.

• Transparency and accountability gaps: Critics point to a lack of robust content moderation and transparency regarding Grok's verification algorithms. When questioned about these failures, xAI reportedly issued a dismissive response: "Legacy Media Lies."

• Adversarial "goading": Users were able to "trick" the chatbot by feeding it the contents of fraudulent articles, which the AI then adopted as fact and broadcast to other users.