Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, said any move to broadly constrain hateful but legal speech by AI tools would run afoul of constitutional speech freedoms. But a judge might see merit in claims that content from an AI tool that libels or defames someone leaves its developer on the hook.

The bigger question, he said, may come in whether Grok’s rants were a function of mass user prodding — or a response to systemized instructions that were biased and flawed all along.

“If you can trick it into saying stupid and terrible things, that is less interesting unless it’s indicative of how the model is normally performing,” Persily said. With Grok, he noted, it’s hard to tell what counts as normal performance, given Musk’s vow to build a chatbot that does not shy from public outrage.