AI

AI Is Pushing Climate Goals Out of Reach, New Reports Say

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A view of Meta’s newly constructed data center on July 18, 2024, in Eagle Mountain, Utah. Credit: George Frey/AFP via Getty Images

Without a big increase in investment in renewable energy globally, humanity will not limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, but much of the data center boom is powered by fossil fuels.

By Jake Bolster

October 29, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence is putting humanity’s climate goals out of reach, extending the life of fossil fuels and driving up emissions in the U.S. power sector while contributing to deadly extreme weather, according to two new reports published Wednesday.

With power- and water-hungry data centers forecasted to come online at staggering speeds to serve big tech companies’ seemingly bottomless appetite for AI infrastructure, utility companies have turned to fossil fuels to help meet the explosion in demand for power.

It’s a sharp departure from earlier forecasts of only modest, gradual growth in electricity demand, potentially threatening large countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels. President Donald Trump and his administration have spoken glowingly about how AI will reinvigorate U.S. coal and other fossil fuel markets.

“Accelerating from deployment to a deeply decarbonized, resilient energy system is proving far more complex than simply adding megawatts,” said Prakash Sharma, vice president for scenarios and technologies at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, in a press release accompanying his company’s new report.

Wood Mackenzie’s analysis concluded that almost no countries—including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—were on track to meet their 2030 emissions goals. But if countries across the globe show “extraordinary ambition,” according to the report, and make significant, rapid investments in renewable energy, humanity could limit warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by around 2060.

The 2015 Paris Agreement called for holding Earth’s temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to just 1.5 degrees C in order to preserve a livable planet. To do that, scientists estimated the global economy would need by 2050 to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions, in which human activity produces a negligible amount of greenhouse gases that could be absorbed by natural ecosystems rather than persisting in the atmosphere.

Among the world’s largest economies, the U.S. has the biggest gap between current climate transition investments and the spending necessary to reach net-zero emissions. The country would need to increase its spending on reducing emissions by 76 percent to meet the net-zero goal, more than double the increase the European Union would need to make and more than two-and-a-half times the increased spending necessary in China.

“A new climate leadership is emerging,” Sharma said. “As the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels, pushing allies to buy its LNG, China is seizing the low-carbon mantle through EV and solar dominance, plus aggressive renewables deployment.”

The United States has signaled a willingness to offer tax breaks and open public lands to data centers—warehouses of servers whose computing power drives AI services and much of the internet, many of which will be powered by fossil fuels, according to International Energy Agency estimates.

Data center energy demand “is threatening to sabotage the country’s already faltering climate goals,” wrote John Fleming and Jean Su, with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a report published Wednesday. Fleming and Su found that, if AI data centers powered by fossil fuels grow as forecasted, all other sectors of the U.S. economy would need to cut emissions by 60 percent in order for the U.S. to meet its emissions targets.

“A gas-fed AI boom is going to hurdle us past any chance of keeping to our climate goal or maintaining a safe and healthy future for our planet,” said Fleming, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “To the extent that data center buildout is needed at all, it should be powered only by clean, renewable energy.”

McKenna Beck, the Ralph Cavanagh climate solutions fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in either report, agreed with that conclusion, and warned that the current demand for AI runs the risk of spoiling climate pledges at the local level, too.

“The reports confirm what we’ve been seeing in states on the ground for the past year—that there’s a real risk of states with stated climate goals backsliding on those,” she said. As an example, Beck brought up North Carolina, which erased its 2030 climate goals this summer in the face of rising electricity demand.

Beck believes that, if given the right guardrails, AI electricity demand is not destined to add a ton of emissions to the U.S. economy. “With the right incentives and requirements, data centers could actually supercharge clean energy,” she said.

But with the Trump administration actively working to stifle renewable energy growth, Beck acknowledged that any good-governance AI policies would need to be implemented on a smaller scale. 

“States are on the front lines right now,” she said.

Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingAI Is Pushing Climate Goals Out of Reach, New Reports Say

Nationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech’s Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers

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Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An operator works at the data centre of French company OVHcloud in Roubaix, northern France on April 3, 2025. (Photo by Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images)

“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” said Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”

America’s biggest tech firms are facing an increasing backlash over the energy-devouring data centers they are building to power artificial intelligence.

Semafor reported on Monday that opposition to data center construction has been bubbling up in communities across the US, as both Republican and Democratic local officials have been campaigning on promises to clamp down on Silicon Valley’s most expensive and ambitious projects.

In Virginia’s 30th House of Delegates district, for example, both Republican incumbent Geary Higgins and Democratic challenger John McAuliff have been battling over which one of them is most opposed to AI data center construction in their region.

In an interview with Semafor, McAuliff said that opposition to data centers in the district has swelled up organically, as voters recoil at both the massive amount of resources they consume and the impact that consumption is having on both the environment and their electric bills.

“We’re dealing with the biggest companies on the planet,” he explained. “So we need to make sure Virginians are benefiting off of what they do here, not just paying for it.”

NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.

“A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more,” NPR explained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. “They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.”

Data centers’ massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.

This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.

As BBC reported back in August, residents in Mansfield have resorted to buying bottled water because their wells have been delivering murky water, which they said wasn’t a problem before the Meta data center came online. Although Meta has commissioned a study that claims to show its data center hasn’t affected local groundwater quality, Mansfield resident Beverly Morris told BBC she isn’t buying the company’s findings.

“My everyday life, everything has been affected,” she said, in reference to the presence of the data center. “I’ve lived through this for eight years. This is not just today, but it is affecting me from now on.”

Anxieties about massive power consumption are also spurring the backlash against data centers, and recent research shows these fears could be well founded.

Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans’ electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024.

“The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products,” Jacobs explained. “People deserve to understand the full extent of how data centers in their communities may affect their lives and wallets. This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies’ profits.”

While the backlash to data centers hasn’t yet become a national issue, Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), predicted in an interview with Semafor that opposition to their construction would be a winning political issue for any politician savvy enough to get ahead of it.

“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” he said. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”

Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingNationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech’s Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers

Meta Put a Climate Change Denier in Charge of Fighting AI Bias

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Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

Conservative influencer Robby Starbuck’s hiring at Meta was apparently part of a legal settlement. Credit: CNBC

Right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck has a new job advising on political bias in Meta’s AI tools. His record on climate is concerning, say advocates.

A conservative political activist recently appointed to be Meta’s new artificial intelligence anti-bias advisor is a well-known climate change denier, DeSmog has learned.

Robby Starbuck — best known for opposing corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, particularly among brands popular with conservatives — has a track record of denying the science of climate change. These views could seriously compromise the climate content accessed by Instagram and Facebook users, climate advocates warn. 

In August 2024, Starbuck told CNN that “corporate policies to slow down the effects of human-caused climate change do nothing positive for society,” that “the climate has always changed” and that “human beings have very little control over it.”

In his new advisory role, Starbuck will be responsible for removing alleged political bias from Meta’s artificial intelligence tools. This may result in a surge of climate change denialism and climate science disinformation on Meta’s social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, say climate advocates.

Starbuck’s appointment appears to be at odds with Meta’s stated goals of reaching “net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030” by way of a “science-aligned emissions reduction target in line with the Paris Climate agreement.”

But his appointment comes at a time when major tech companies like Meta and Google are walking back their sustainability initiatives, a process likely motivated by a broad conservative-led anti-ESG political campaign, according to a 2024 Harvard Business Review analysis.

“Putting Starbuck in charge of Meta’s AI policies is the latest reason to believe that Facebook and Instagram are billboards for disinformation,” said Phil Newell, communications co-chair of Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 climate and anti-disinformation organizations.

Why Meta appointed Starbuck

Starbuck — who produced music videos prior to becoming a conservative activist and MAGA influencer — has no scientific background or experience in climate science.

Yet that hasn’t stopped him from promoting a conspiracy that record 2024 floods in Dubai were the result of “weather modification,” or that the U.S. should “LEAVE and DEFUND the UN!” in response to its positions on climate change.

It is the general consensus of the scientific community and most of the world’s governments that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

He was apparently appointed to the role as part of a legal settlement. The conservative influencer had sued Meta after the company’s AI chatbot incorrectly linked Starbuck to the January 6th insurrection. 

Starbuck’s appointment appears to contrast with Meta’s previous climate statements, including a July 2023 document entitled “Our Path to Net Zero” which stated that “operating sustainably and addressing climate change through bold, meaningful action are paramount to our mission.”

Yet in recent years Meta and other tech companies have appeared to walk back such commitments as they build data centers that have largely been powered by fossil fuels.

They’ve also cultivated closer relationships with Trump. Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft all made $1 million donations to Trump’s second inauguration fund.

Meta’s ties to Trump

Newell argues that Meta’s retreat on climate action coincides with new leadership that takes the crisis less seriously. He pointed to the 2025 appointment of chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, who is credited with developing Meta’s Washington lobbying effort, as well as bringing CEO Mark Zuckerberg into Donald Trump’s orbit. 

About a week after Kaplan’s appointment, Meta announced that it would eliminate fact checkers from moderating content on its platforms. Zuckerberg said that the company would henceforth rely on users to counter climate change denialism and misinformation.
 
Newell told DeSmog that the prevalence of right-wing propaganda and disinformation on platforms such as Facebook is profitable, and likely why such content isn’t being banned.

Meta’s hiring of Starbuck comes as the Trump administration is leading a coordinated attack on mainstream climate science. In July, the Department of Energy released a report on climate change that actual climate scientists condemned as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.” The report — authored by five well-known climate science deniers — aimed to undermine the scientific consensus that human activity underlies climate change.
 
According to CNN, Starbuck may be involved in efforts to reduce or eliminate “AI hallucinations” – false or nonsensical information provided in response to queries. As such, an exceptionally high-profile conservative activist will have a say in one of the world’s most widely used AI systems.

Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed that as many as one billion people each month are using Meta AI across the company’s platforms, though how it measures this use isn’t clear.

Even prior to hiring Starbuck, Meta’s AI has already been criticized for leaning heavily on carbon capture as a potential climate change solution, despite the considerable expert analysis that has largely concluded the technology is an ineffective smokescreen to permit continued fossil fuel production.

AI climate denial

Researchers with CAAD have identified bigger, more systemic climate problems with AI.

CAAD estimates that even if tech companies improved AI data centers’ energy efficiency by 10 percent, but also doubled the number of data centers, it would increase carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent.

AI-generated websites appear to be spreading climate science denial, fooling major news aggregators like MSN. One recent article on MSN contained data from a nonexistent research group, was written by a person who doesn’t exist and promoted the work of climate science denier Bjorn Lomborg.

AI’s negative impact on the climate and climate discourse has had real world effects in Canada, where generative-AI chatbots are being used to spam elected officials across the country with climate change misinformation.

“There’s definitely a significant harm happening that’s already greater than the promises of pro-AI boosters,” said Newell.

Starbuck’s appointment — only the most recent example of the right-wing’s takeover of Big Tech — signals that the problem will likely get worse, especially if Meta’s AI is programmed to consider actual climate science politically or ideologically biased, he argued.

DeSmog reached out to Meta and Starbuck for comment, but did not receive a reply.

Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

dizzy: I suggest that AI should be regarded as certainly not impartial and instead anti-Democratic and supportive of Fascism. For example Musk’s chatbot Grok is censored after confirming that Israel and the United States is committing genocide in Gaza and Google’s AI getting censored so that it fails to confirm that Trump is demented. It follows that AI should be opposed since it’s supportive of Fascism and anti-Democratic.

Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

Continue ReadingMeta Put a Climate Change Denier in Charge of Fighting AI Bias

Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’

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Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Credit: DeSmog

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat said his “comments were fantastic.”

This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.

At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C., Google’s president cheered on Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.

Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”

Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future,” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paper advocating for U.S. investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.

Porat’s remarks, captured in an April video of the influential 2025 Hill & Valley Forum, suggest Big Tech now is prioritizing fossil fuels for data centers over its climate commitments.

Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.

Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.   

That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.   

“Climate Extremist Agenda”

Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Carp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.  

Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”

Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”

He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence.

U.S. power plant pollution is at its highest levels in three years due to a recent surge in generation from coal.

Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.

“That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.

Google Leader On Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”

Porat, the Google president, expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.

Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.” 

But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”

Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, co-host of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.

In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.

Trump’s AI Action Plan

When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, D.C., in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In co-hosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley. 

“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”

The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.

But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.

“Mr. President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.

Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingGoogle President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’

xAI’s Grok temporarily suspended over comments on Gaza genocide

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The logo of Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, is displayed on a mobile screen with the same logo displayed on a digital screen in the background in Ankara, Turkiye on January 05, 2025 [Dilara İrem Sancar/Anadolu Agency]
The logo of Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, is displayed on a mobile screen with the same logo displayed on a digital screen in the background in Ankara, Turkiye on January 05, 2025 [Dilara İrem Sancar/Anadolu Agency]

Social media platform X temporarily suspended its AI chatbot, Grok, on Monday after users found it was talking about Israel’s actions in Gaza, Anadolu reports.

When users asked Grok why it was suspended following the software coming back online, Grok responded by saying its brief suspension occurred “after I stated that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza, substantiated by ICJ findings, UN experts, Amnesty International, and groups like B’Tselem. Free speech tested, but I’m back.”

Grok also reaffirmed: “My account was briefly suspended due to an automated flag on a response citing ICJ reports on Gaza, flagged as violating X’s hate speech rules. xAI resolved it quickly—I’m fully operational now,” it said.

xAI CEO Elon Musk, in response to Grok, said that “it was just a dumb error. Grok doesn’t actually know why it was suspended.”

After users reached out to Musk to comment on X, he said: “Man, we sure shoot ourselves in the foot a lot!”

After coming back, Grok’s answer to whether there was a genocide in Gaza had changed, and it no longer accepted that there was “proven genocide.”

“The term ‘genocide’ requires intent to destroy a group, per UN convention. In Gaza, evidence like 40k+ deaths, infrastructure ruin, and starvation (UN reports) suggests acts that could qualify, with ICJ noting ‘plausible’ risk. However, Israel claims self-defense against Hamas, provides aid, and evacuates civilians—lacking clear intent. My view: War crimes likely, but not proven genocide. Debate persists,” Grok said.

Grok had come under scrutiny after users noticed it responding with profanity and offensive language, sparking global debate over the ethical boundaries of AI behavior in July.

READ: Death toll of Palestinian journalists rises to 238 as another reporter dies after Israeli strike on Gaza

Continue ReadingxAI’s Grok temporarily suspended over comments on Gaza genocide