Elon Musk’s new AI project, Grokipedia, challenges Wikipedia’s dominance with claims of bias and a promise to “purge propaganda.” But can an AI encyclopedia stay neutral?
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| From San Francisco, Elon Musk unveils Grokipedia — an AI-powered encyclopedia challenging Wikipedia’s credibility while raising questions about bias and information control. Image: CH |
SAN FRANCISCO, United States — October 28, 2025:
Elon Musk has unveiled Grokipedia, an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia that his company xAI describes as a mission to “purge out the propaganda” dominating online knowledge. The platform, launched this week, crashed shortly after going live but already boasts more than 800,000 AI-generated entries, a fraction of Wikipedia’s nearly eight million human-written articles.
Visitors to grokipedia.com encounter a minimalist homepage — a logo, a search bar, and a promise to “rethink truth through AI.” Yet early content reveals the unmistakable imprint of Musk’s worldview. The entry about Musk himself portrays him as “an innovative visionary and irreverent provocateur” and even notes his preference for “morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily.”
More contentious pages, however, are drawing scrutiny. A Grokipedia article on gender transition asserts that scientific evidence on the topic is “limited and of low quality,” mirroring Musk’s own public skepticism. This contrasts sharply with Wikipedia’s stance, which cites decades of peer-reviewed research in support of medical consensus on gender identity.
Entries covering figures like Donald Trump, OpenAI, and Parag Agrawal similarly emphasize Musk’s narrative — including unverified claims about Twitter’s bot accounts that do not appear in Wikipedia’s version.
A spokesperson for xAI declined to comment on the launch or the site’s brief outage.
Musk has long accused Wikipedia of liberal bias and “legacy media propaganda.” His latest attack came after the site documented a controversial hand gesture he made at a political event, prompting him to urge donors to “stop funding” what he called “a captured platform.”
His allies, including investor and former Trump advisor David Sacks, hailed Grokipedia as a long-overdue competitor. “I hope Grokipedia challenges Wikipedia’s dominance,” Sacks said, adding that the latter could avoid such threats by “stopping the blackballing of conservative outlets.”
Analysts say the launch marks a new phase in the information wars, where ideological divides increasingly shape the platforms people trust. Musk’s framing — that Grokipedia will restore “truth” through AI — appeals to supporters who view mainstream institutions as compromised. Yet it also risks turning an encyclopedia into a partisan battleground.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales dismissed the notion that AI can replace human fact-checking. “It’s about digging in and doing the work — that’s the only thing I know how to do,” he said.
Selena Deckelmann, Chief Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, echoed that caution. She noted that while human traffic to Wikipedia has dropped 8% this year, automated scraping by AI models has surged. “People will take information from these tools at face value, and that information may or may not be correct,” she warned. “Wikipedia’s strength lies in letting people dig into the sources themselves.”
Grokipedia’s debut exposes a central paradox in Musk’s vision: can an AI trained on human data ever escape human bias? Despite its claims of neutrality, the platform reflects the priorities of its creator and the algorithmic systems that shape its language.
For now, Grokipedia’s greatest impact may not be its content but the conversation it reignites — about who defines truth in the age of AI, and whether technological disruption can ever substitute for editorial transparency.
As Grokipedia seeks to outshine Wikipedia, Musk isn’t merely building another AI tool — he’s attempting to rewrite the rules of credibility itself. Whether this experiment expands human knowledge or narrows it into ideology remains to be seen.