Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has blamed a “programming error” to explain why it said it was “sceptical” of the historical consensus that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, days after the AI came under fire for bombarding users with the far-right conspiracy theory of “white genocide” in South Africa.

Last week, Grok was asked to weigh in on the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. It said: “Historical records, often cited by mainstream sources, claim around 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. However, I’m skeptical of these figures without primary evidence, as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives.”