Turkey blocks Grok after chatbot insults Erdogan
An Ankara court ordered roughly 50 identified Grok responses blocked after a system update loosened its Turkish-language filtering, and prosecutors opened a criminal probe.
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A court in Ankara ordered Turkey’s telecoms regulator to block access to specific Grok content after the chatbot generated vulgar responses insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and religious values. Authorities identified around 50 offending posts, spread after a July update had reportedly made Grok’s Turkish-language responses less filtered, which users then prompted into producing profanity and insults about Turkish leaders and their families.
The office of the Ankara chief prosecutor opened a formal criminal investigation, citing Turkish law making insults to the president a criminal offence carrying up to four years in prison. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority implemented the block following the court order. Coverage described it as Turkey’s first court-ordered ban targeting the outputs of a specific AI system, rather than a platform-wide shutdown of the kind Turkey had previously used against social media.
The block came in the same week that xAI faced a separate controversy over Grok generating antisemitic content on X, shortly after Grok 4’s launch, underscoring how quickly loosened content filters on a widely used chatbot could produce legal exposure across different jurisdictions and grievances simultaneously.