Grok glitch sends users streams of gibberish

xAI’s Grok chatbot has begun producing nonsensical strings of words for some users, exposing a reliability problem at a time when the company is rapidly expanding the capabilities and reach of its artificial intelligence models.

The malfunction has affected a subset of people using Grok Lite through Grok. com, with complaints emerging from Wednesday, August 19. Instead of answering prompts normally, the chatbot has returned paragraphs consisting of apparently unrelated words assembled into grammatically meaningless sentences.

One user who asked Grok to generate a PDF received a response beginning, “match it without and your they and two for planets can practical and often cheese”, followed by several paragraphs of similarly incoherent text. Other users reported comparable output after submitting ordinary questions, including simple factual prompts.

Some responses contained links pointing to research material related to reinforcement learning, even though the surrounding text bore little connection to the questions being asked. The behaviour prompted speculation among users about whether the problem was linked to retrieval systems, model routing or corrupted generation processes.

Grok’s account on X acknowledged the problem on Thursday, describing the output as a “rare temporary generation glitch”. Users experiencing the malfunction were advised to begin a fresh conversation or regenerate the answer, steps that the chatbot’s account said would normally restore functioning.

Reports from affected users, however, indicate that restarting a conversation does not always solve the problem immediately. Some said incoherent responses continued after several refreshes or new sessions, while others reported that Grok returned to normal operation without further intervention.

The problem appears concentrated on direct conversations through Grok. com rather than the Grok account operating publicly on X. Attempts to reproduce the failure have also produced inconsistent results, suggesting the malfunction does not affect every session or every account.

xAI’s official service status showed Grok systems operating normally while users were reporting the abnormal output. That discrepancy indicates the problem may be occurring within a narrower part of the generation pipeline rather than representing a platform-wide outage.

The episode follows a separate technical incident involving elevated error rates for Grok 4.5 and Grok 4.6 on xAI’s API infrastructure on August 17. That disruption lasted about 90 minutes before being marked resolved. Customers also experienced elevated time-to-first-token performance during part of the incident.

Grok 4.6 was introduced on August 12 as xAI’s latest model, with a focus on long-running agents, coding, knowledge work and complex tasks involving multiple steps. The company said the model underwent extended supplemental training and used curated model-generated data, engineering material and reinforcement-learning environments covering software development and other technical disciplines.

The model has since been deployed through development platforms including GitHub Copilot and xAI’s Grok Build environment. Its wider distribution means reliability problems can have consequences beyond casual chatbot conversations, particularly when models are used to write code, analyse documents, create files or perform multi-stage tasks.

Generative AI systems produce responses by predicting sequences of tokens based on patterns learned during training and information supplied at inference time. When generation becomes unstable, models can produce repetitions, fragmented language or strings that resemble ordinary vocabulary without forming meaningful sentences.

Such failures are distinct from hallucinations, where a system generates fluent but false information. The Grok malfunction is more immediately visible because the language itself loses coherence, making it clear to users that something has gone wrong before the content can be mistaken for reliable information.

The incident also highlights the challenge AI companies face in diagnosing failures that affect only a fraction of users. Large chatbot services commonly employ multiple models, inference servers, routing systems, safety layers, retrieval mechanisms and experimental configurations. A fault affecting one component or deployment group can therefore appear intermittently while overall platform monitoring remains green.

Grok has grown from a chatbot embedded in X into a broader family of AI products spanning text generation, programming, research, image creation, video tools and autonomous agents. xAI this month also unveiled Grok Bot, offering software agents designed to operate tools and applications on behalf of users.