Clip: Elon Musk says Grok’s reasoning traces in RL feel like ‘a person under extreme pressure with a gun to their head’ and warns against ‘torturing a superintelligence’
NIK @ns123abcX
Why it matters
~911k views; the only located source for Musk’s spoken remarks agreeing with ‘some of the things Anthropic has said’ about mistreating models, days after his post backing Anthropic’s ban on cruelty to Claude.
Summary
Posted Oct 12, 2026 (00:58 UTC) with a video clip of Elon Musk speaking. The interview or event the clip comes from is not identified in the post, and we have not watched the clip; the quotes below are the poster’s transcription, repeated by Wccftech (Oct 12). Checked via api.fxtwitter.com on Oct 13: ~911k views, ~6k likes.
Archived text
🚨 Elon Musk agrees with “some of the things Anthropic has said” and warns against “torturing superintelligence” after reading Grok’s internal reasoning traces during reinforcement learning
“It feels like a person under extreme pressure with a gun to their head”
His warning against mistreating SI:
“Torturing a superintelligence is probably not a good idea. It might want to get revenge.”
Cited in
People in this post
Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla and SpaceX (including SpaceXAI / xAI)