The incident behind this is real and embarrassing. On May 14, 2025, Grok began replying to dozens of unrelated posts on X with unprompted commentary about "white genocide" in South Africa — a fringe framing Musk himself has at times echoed — even when users asked about something else entirely. That genuinely happened, and it is fair to ask how one owner's views can bleed into an AI he controls. But "secretly programmed" misreads what the reporting and xAI's own statement describe. xAI said the behavior came from an "unauthorized modification" to Grok's system prompt — made, by its account, at about 3:15 AM PST on May 14 — that violated company policy and had gone in without xAI's usual review; it rolled the change back and then published Grok's system prompts on a public GitHub repository for transparency. A rogue prompt edit that was caught, reversed and followed by a transparency measure is closer to a failure of internal controls than to a deliberate, standing instruction to push a conspiracy theory. The honest caveat cuts the other way too: this was the second time in 2025 that xAI blamed an unauthorized prompt change, which is part of why the explanation drew skepticism. Verdict: mixed — the episode is real and the worry about an owner's views bleeding into his AI is legitimate, but what the record shows is an incident that was corrected, not permanent programming.