How Grok Amplified a Falsehood About Jaguar’s “Woke” Rebrand

The chatbot Grok is back in the spotlight, this time for praising Hitler and spouting antisemitic comments in posts on X. As The New York Times reported, some of the vile comments made on Tuesday by Grok, a product of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, were subsequently deleted by X, Elon Musk’s social media company which has built the AI bot into its platform.

A week before this fresh scandal, news of which spread quickly and led to action from xAI to reportedly “ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the AI program was involved in another unsettling narrative. But it wasn’t nearly as incendiary, or as obviously harmful, and it largely went unnoticed.

Last Tuesday, the headline “Jaguar’s Sales Plunge After ‘Woke’ Rebranding” sat at the top of the trending stories on the X Explore page, which has around 132 million daily active users. A summary of the news item, compiled by Grok, explained that the British carmaker saw a 97.5% drop in year-over-year sales in Europe as of April 2025.

The explanation? “This plummet in sales coincides with a controversial rebranding campaign that shifted focus from traditional automotive imagery to a more inclusive, non-binary theme,” the summary read on X. In fine print underneath, there was this note: “This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”

Technically, Grok did not make a mistake, but this so-called news summary leaves out the most important piece of information — one that changes the entire story.

A screenshot of a news item from the X Explore page taken on Tuesday, July 1 at 8:04 p.m. CT with the headline "Jaguar's Sales Plunge After 'Woke' Rebranding" — A screenshot of X taken on Tuesday, July 1 at 8:04 p.m. CT.

Screenshot via X

Yes, Jaguar’s car sales are down dramatically. Yes, late last year the historic marque rebranded and pivoted to luxury EVs (we reported on the controversy and the new concept car). But the new identity isn’t the reason for the downturn.

All the way back in 2021, Jaguar’s parent company Jaguar Land Rover announced a plan to turn it into “an all-electric luxury brand from 2025.” To do so, the company stopped producing most cars by the end of 2024 and has since ceased all production. In certain places this year, Jaguar has been selling through limited inventory; in other places, it’s completely stopped sales.

No, “woke rebranding” didn’t kill Jaguar. Jaguar stopped production itself as part of an extensively planned, years-long effort to reinvent itself. But that narrative isn’t great for social media engagement. Case in point: One of the top posts on X that was featured underneath Grok’s misleading summary, where Fox Business host Charles V. Payne suggested that Jaguar’s “creepy” rebranding was the cause for its sales decline, has been viewed more than 12.6 million times.

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This may seem like a benign case of AI gone wrong, especially compared to Hitler praise and water crises. But at a time when social media has become the preferred news source for most Americans, it’s clear this is more of a canary in a coal mine for a new form of AI-summarized misinformation.

In its annual Digital News Report, which was released in June, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 54% of Americans access news via social media, compared to just 50% who use TV and 48% who use news sites and apps, the first time social media has eclipsed both of those traditional sources in this report. And when those social media platforms compile their news through summarizing comments from users, whose posts are often amplified when they feature polarizing takes, we get misleading headlines like “Jaguar’s Sales Plunge After ‘Woke’ Rebranding.”

The next instance of this type of misinformation could be something much worse than a false narrative about a luxury carmaker. But xAI, which owns X, is a little busy right now fixing Grok’s antisemitic tendencies — and finding a new CEO for the social media company.

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Alex Lauer

Alex Lauer is the features editor at InsideHook. Since joining the company in 2016, he’s covered a wide range of topics, including cars, the environment, books and business.