Grok is sending some users gibberish responses

One user asked Grok to generate a PDF and instead received: “match it without and your they and two for planets can practical and often cheese…” with similar nonsense continuing for several paragraphs. Another user found the response’s source links pointed to a string of reinforcement learning research sites instead of anything relevant. Affected users told TechCrunch they were using Grok Lite and first noticed the issue as early as Wednesday morning. TechCrunch could not reproduce the glitch in its own testing, and it appears to affect only a small subset of users; xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

The bug seems limited to direct queries made on Grok.com — the Grok account on X.com has not shown the same behavior. Grok’s Reddit community has been flooded with complaints, and while refreshing the session restores normal function for some users, others reported the gibberish persisting even after multiple refreshes.

Responding to users on X on Thursday morning, the Grok account wrote: “That pure word salad is a rare temporary generation glitch. Official status at https://status.x.ai shows all Grok services fully operational with no incidents. Start a fresh chat or regenerate—it usually clears right away. Sorry about the gibberish.”

The glitch lands during a rocky stretch for xAI’s team: the company has seen significant staff turnover in recent months, losing most of its founding team and at least 50 researchers and engineers, according to a May report from The Information. xAI released its most recent foundation model in July, describing it as “an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost.”

Why it matters

A visible, unexplained output glitch — even a narrow one — is a rough advertisement for reliability at a company simultaneously trying to sell enterprises on adopting its models for production use.