Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk
When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself.
Over the weekend, users on social media reported that, asked “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader?” with the “Think” setting enabled, Grok 3 noted in its “chain of thought” that it was explicitly instructed not to mention Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The chain of thought is the “reasoning” process the model uses to arrive at an answer to a question.
TechCrunch was able to replicate this behavior once, but as of publication time on Sunday morning, Grok 3 was once again mentioning Donald Trump in its answer to the misinformation query.
While “misinformation” can be a politically charged and contested category, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly spread claims that were demonstrably false (as often pointed out by the Community Notes on Musk-owned X). In the past week alone, they’ve advanced the false narratives that Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a “dictator” with a 4% public approval rating, and that Ukraine started the ongoing conflict with Russia.
The controversial apparent tweak to Grok 3 comes as some criticize the model as being too left-leaning. This week, users discovered that Grok 3 would consistently say that President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI quickly patched the issue; Igor Babuschkin, the company’s head of engineering, called it a “really terrible and bad failure.”
When Musk announced Grok roughly two years ago, he pitched the AI model as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke” — in general, willing to answer controversial questions other AI systems won’t. He delivered on some of that promise. Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok and Grok 2 would happily oblige, spewing colorful language you likely wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
But Grok models prior to Grok 3 hedged on political subjects and wouldn’t cross certain boundaries. In fact, one study found that Grok leaned to the political left on topics like transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality.
Ukraine’s Zelensky Wants Better Terms on Minerals Deal Demanded by Trump
The Ukrainian president called for security guarantees and better financial terms
KYIV, Ukraine—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Trump administration should offer a better deal on mineral rights, pushing back on a proposal that has provoked a public feud with Washington.
Speaking at a press conference Sunday, Zelensky said the current U.S. offer demanded ruinous financial contributions from Ukraine, which on Monday marks the three-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
He demanded security guarantees as part of any deal, as well as better financial terms. “I don’t want something that 10 generations of Ukrainians will have to pay back,” he said.
The Trump administration has demanded preferential access to Ukrainian mineral reserves, which include sought-after titanium, lithium and rare earths, as payback for U.S. aid to Ukraine during the war.
Acrimony over the U.S. demands sparked a war of words between President Trump and Zelensky last week in which the Ukrainian president said Trump was “living in a disinformation space” and Trump called the Ukrainian president a dictator.
Fearing an outright collapse in relations, aides to both presidents tried to push the two sides together and on Friday were saying that they were close to a deal.
This weekend, the Trump administration went on the offensive in defense of the deal. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, national security adviser Mike Waltz called the deal a “reformulation of how the United States provides aid, a partnership with Ukraine economically in their critical minerals” so that the U.S. gets “a return on this massive investment they have made” in Ukraine’s defense.
The dispute over the minerals proposal has played a central role in disagreements between the U.S. and its allies about how best to end the war in Ukraine. Trump has reached out to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and negotiators from the U.S. and Russia met in Saudi Arabia to discuss bilateral relations and the war.
At the same time, Trump has assailed Zelensky for his complaints over not being involved in the talks and Ukraine’s postponement of presidential elections, which according to the country’s legislation can’t take place during martial law.
On Sunday, Zelensky responded to some of Trump’s jabs, reiterating that elections weren’t possible during war.
“How are people at the front going to vote if they can’t return home to vote?” Zelensky said. “I don’t understand what that would be like.”
Asked whether he was ready to step down before an election, Zelensky said he would if his resignation led to peace for Ukraine or the country’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“If it’s peace for Ukraine, if I really need to leave my post then I’m ready,” he said. “I can exchange it for NATO, if there are such conditions.”
Zelensky has long pressed for quick NATO membership, but the Trump administration and some European allies are against it.
Apple wants the iPhone 17 Pro to replace your camera for video recording: report
According to the Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple plans to heavily focus on video recording improvements for the new iPhone 17 Pro models. The company has previously focused primarily on photography, so it’s nice to hear that video will be getting some much-needed love.
Apple wants the iPhone to replace your camera. They’ve been trying to develop the best mobile camera system for quite some time. Soon, they’ll be taking that a step further, by focusing more heavily on video. iPhones have always been fairly good at video, but Apple want
According to the Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple plans to heavily focus on video recording improvements for the new iPhone 17 Pro models. The company has previously focused primarily on photography, so it’s nice to hear that video will be getting some much-needed love.
Apple wants the iPhone to replace your camera. They’ve been trying to develop the best mobile camera system for quite some time. Soon, they’ll be taking that a step further, by focusing more heavily on video. iPhones have always been fairly good at video, but Apple want
BMW pauses £600mn investment plan to produce electric Minis in Oxford
German carmaker’s review follows UK plant closures by Honda, Ford and JLR over the past decade
BMW has paused a £600mn investment plan to produce electric Mini cars in Oxford, putting the future of the historic plant under threat as the industry grapples with a slower than expected move away from petrol vehicles.
The investment review comes as a further blow to the UK’s car industry following plant closures by Honda, Ford and JLR over the past decade. In November, Stellantis blamed the UK’s electric vehicle sales targets as it announced plans to shut its van factory in Luton, putting about 1,100 jobs at risk.
“Given the multiple uncertainties facing the automotive industry, the BMW group is currently reviewing the timing for reintroducing battery-electric Mini production in Oxford,” the German carmaker said in a statement.
Car companies have been putting pressure on the UK government to water down its EV targets, which require a certain percentage of each carmaker’s annual sales to be zero-emission vehicles.
The level is set to rise from 28 per cent this year to 80 per cent in 2030, with companies facing fines of £15,000 for each missed vehicle.
Sales of EVs are growing in the UK but remain below official targets, prompting carmakers such as Nissan to warn that jobs in the UK could be at risk unless the government relaxes its EV sales rules.
According to its original plan announced in 2023, BMW had intended to manufacture two new electric models — the three-door Mini Cooper and the smaller Mini Aceman — at the site in Cowley, providing a lifeline to the factory by reducing its reliance on petrol cars, which the German group has aimed to phase out by 2030.
The two models are based on a system developed by BMW and China’s Great Wall Motor. The fact that they are at present produced in China and sold in the EU means the models have also been hit by higher tariffs that Brussels imposed on Chinese EV imports in October.
Last year, registrations of new Mini cars in the UK fell 1.3 per cent from a year earlier to 46,975 vehicles, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Data by Schmidt Automotive Research showed that 2024 registrations of electric Mini cars increased 4.9 per cent to 36,932 vehicles in western Europe, including the UK.
News of BMW’s plans were first reported by Auto Express.
The government last week ended its fast-track consultation with the auto industry on how to improve flexibility in the scheme to try to give manufacturers more breathing space.
“We recognise the global challenges car manufacturers face and have listened to their concerns . . . while also protecting jobs,” said the Department for Transport.
Following the consultation’s completion, Ford UK boss Lisa Brankin called for purchase incentives and other government support, warning that the “adoption of electric vehicles isn’t happening fast enough”. The US group last year announced 800 job cuts in the UK because of slower than expected EV sales.
Trump administration reportedly shutting down federal EV chargers nationwide
The General Services Administration, the agency that manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down its entire network of electric vehicle chargers, according to a report in The Verge.
The GSA reportedly operates a network of hundreds of EV chargers with a total of 8,000 plugs that can be used to charge vehicles owned by the government and by federal employees. A source told The Verge that federal workers will receive guidance next week to shut those chargers down, with some regional offices already told to take their chargers offline.
Earlier this week, Colorado Public Radio obtained an internal email stating that charging stations at the Denver Federal Center would be shut down as they are “not mission critical.”
More broadly, President Donald Trump’s administration has been aggressively cutting government agencies and pulling back federal support for renewable energy, including for an EV charging infrastructure program that previously provided millions to Tesla.
TechCrunch has reached out to the GSA for comment.
Did xAI lie about Grok 3’s benchmarks?
Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view.
This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was in the right.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
In a post on xAI’s blog, the company published a graph showing Grok 3’s performance on AIME 2025, a collection of challenging math questions from a recent invitational mathematics exam. Some experts have questioned AIME’s validity as an AI benchmark. Nevertheless, AIME 2025 and older versions of the test are commonly used to probe a model’s math ability.
xAI’s graph showed two variants of Grok 3, Grok 3 Reasoning Beta and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, beating OpenAI’s best-performing available model, o3-mini-high, on AIME 2025. But OpenAI employees on X were quick to point out that xAI’s graph didn’t include o3-mini-high’s AIME 2025 score at “cons@64.”
What is cons@64, you might ask? Well, it’s short for “consensus@64,” and it basically gives a model 64 tries to answer each problem in a benchmark and takes the answers generated most frequently as the final answers. As you can imagine, cons@64 tends to boost models’ benchmark scores quite a bit, and omitting it from a graph might make it appear as though one model surpasses another when in reality, that’s isn’t the case.
Grok 3 Reasoning Beta and Grok 3 mini Reasoning’s scores for AIME 2025 at “@1” — meaning the first score the models got on the benchmark — fall below o3-mini-high’s score. Grok 3 Reasoning Beta also trails ever-so-slightly behind OpenAI’s o1 model set to “medium” computing. Yet xAI is advertising Grok 3 as the “world’s smartest AI.”
Babushkin argued on X that OpenAI has published similarly misleading benchmark charts in the past — albeit charts comparing the performance of its own models. A more neutral party in the debate put together a more “accurate” graph showing nearly every model’s performance at cons@64:
Hilarious how some people see my plot as attack on OpenAI and others as attack on Grok while in reality it’s DeepSeek propaganda
(I actually believe Grok looks good there, and openAI’s TTC chicanery behind o3-mini-*high*-pass@”””1″”” deserves more scrutiny.) https://t.co/dJqlJpcJh8 pic.twitter.com/3WH8FOUfic
— Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) (@teortaxesTex) February 20, 2025
But as AI researcher Nathan Lambert pointed out in a post, perhaps the most important metric remains a mystery: the computational (and monetary) cost it took for each model to achieve its best score. That just goes to show how little most AI benchmarks communicate about models’ limitations — and their strengths.