Built using huge amounts of computing power at a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk's attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in building an AI assistant that shows its reasoning before answering a question.

A former professor and the founder of his own AI company, Howard noticed that if he asked Grok about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the chatbot seemed to cross-check Elon’s tweets before regurgitating an answer.

The unusual behavior of Grok 4, the AI model that Musk's company xAI released late Wednesday, has surprised some experts.