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Grokipedia
AI-generated encyclopedia developed by xAI From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025. Its entries are largely generated by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company. The rest of the entries have been forked from Wikipedia, with some copied nearly verbatim. Articles cannot be directly edited, though logged-in visitors to the encyclopedia can suggest corrections via a pop-up form. As of December 2025[update], the site has over 1 million articles.
Elon Musk, the founder of xAI, promoted Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" supposedly found in the latter. Shortly after launch, several sources described articles as promoting right-wing perspectives, conspiracy theories, and Musk's personal views. Other criticism of Grokipedia focused on its accuracy due to AI hallucinations and potential algorithmic bias. Studies have highlighted its use of sources deemed as having very low credibility such as Twitter conversations and a neo-Nazi website, and for writing about far-right figures and topics in a promotional manner.
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Background
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers. Its possible bias has been studied and debated since its inception.[1][2] A variety of online encyclopedia projects have launched with the stated goal of correcting Wikipedia's perceived biases, such as Conservapedia, launched in 2006 to counter perceived left-wing bias.[3]
xAI is an American AI company founded by Elon Musk in 2023.[4] Its flagship product is the family of large language models called Grok.[5]
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History
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Musk's views on Wikipedia
In 2021, Musk expressed affection for Wikipedia on its 20th anniversary.[6] In 2022, however, Musk argued that Wikipedia was "losing its objectivity",[6] and in 2023, said he would donate a billion dollars to the project if it was pejoratively renamed "Dickipedia".[6] In December 2024, Musk called for a boycott of donations to Wikipedia over its perceived left-wing bias, calling it "Wokepedia". In January 2025, Musk made a series of statements on Twitter denouncing Wikipedia for its description of the incident where he made a controversial gesture, which many viewed as resembling a Nazi salute, at president Donald Trump's second inauguration.[7][8] Musk has since positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" in the latter,[9] with Musk describing Wikipedia as "woke" and an "extension of legacy media propaganda".[10]
Idea and announcement
In September 2025, Musk spoke at the All-In podcast conference with David O. Sacks, the White House advisor on AI and cryptocurrency, about how Grok consumed data from Wikipedia and other sources to gain more complete knowledge of the world. Sacks suggested publishing its knowledge base as an artifact called "Grokipedia", saying "Wikipedia is so biased, it's a constant war".[6]
Following the conversation, Musk announced that xAI was building a new AI-generated online encyclopedia called Grokipedia.[11][12] According to Musk's announcement, it would be an AI-powered knowledge base designed to rival Wikipedia by addressing its perceived biases, errors, and ideological slants.[13] Gizmodo compared the plan to the 2006 Conservapedia project.[14]
Launch and traffic
On October 6, 2025, Musk announced that the early version of Grokipedia was scheduled for release later that month.[15][16] The project was postponed briefly in October to address content quality issues.[9] It launched on October 27, 2025, labeled "v 0.1",[17] with over 800,000 articles,[9] compared to over seven million English Wikipedia articles as of September 1, 2025[update].[18] According to an initial analysis of usage figures by Similarweb, which evaluates data from registered users and partners, Grokipedia recorded a peak of over 460,000 website visits in the US on October 28, 2025. After that, traffic dropped significantly and settled at around 35,000 visits per day between November 8 and 11, 2025.[19]
Updates
Future
In November 2025, Musk announced that he plans to change the name of the site to Encyclopedia Galactica when "Grokipedia is good enough", claiming that in the future copies of the encyclopedia will be sent to "the Moon and Mars and out to deep space."[21]
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Content
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The Grok large language model generates and fact-checks articles on Grokipedia.[22] Logged-in users can report errors in articles, but not directly edit them;[23] starting in version 0.2, Grok reviews and implements suggested edits.[24] Some articles are nearly identical to their Wikipedia entries, but the format of Grokipedia citations is different.[25][26] Some Grokipedia articles were republished almost verbatim, accompanied by a disclaimer noting that the content was "adapted from Wikipedia" under a Creative Commons license. Others were completely rewritten from scratch using Musk's AI chatbot, Grok.[27] Forbes identified the articles PlayStation 5, Lamborghini, and AMD as examples of copied Wikipedia articles.[22] Articles attributed to Wikipedia carry a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, while the license of other articles is licensed under the "X Community License",[28] a license that accepts reuse and remixing for "non-commercial and research purposes" and commercial use that abides to "all of the guardrails provided in xAI's Acceptable Use Policy".[29]
On October 31, 2025, Musk clarified that the duplication of Wikipedia articles was intentional, saying that the Grokipedia team instructed Grok to compile Wikipedia's top 1 million articles and make content changes to them.[30] The site's design has been described as minimalist,[31][32] with a simple homepage including little more than a large search bar,[31] and, starting in version 0.2, a small panel rotating through a display of the names of around five articles recently edited.[24] Articles do not feature images.[33]
Reliability
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A November 2025 study by Cornell University researchers found that Grokipedia cited sources deemed as having "very low credibility" by the academic community 12,522 times, and used exchanges between Twitter users and the Grok AI chatbot as sources 1,050 times. An example of the latter was a Grok chatbot conversation where a user asked it to "dig up some dirt" on a Belgian politician. The study also found that Grokipedia and Wikipedia often used the same 57 of the top 100 sources used, but 5.5% of Grokipedia sources diverged and used sources blacklisted by Wikipedia, including the conspiracy theory site Infowars, the white nationalist site VDare, and the neo-Nazi site Stormfront, as authoritative sources dozens of times.[27]
Factual inaccuracies
Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people".[34] LGBTQ Nation also highlighted how Grokipedia has an article on "HIV/AIDS skepticism" which claims there is legitimate scientific critique that HIV does not cause AIDS.[35] The Verge highlighted other instances of articles that legitimize ideas and conspiracy theories that go against scientific consensus, pointing to topics such as vaccines and autism, COVID-19, race and intelligence, and climate change.[36] The Guardian highlighted several pages that supported a variety of pseudoscientific claims around discredited 20th-century scientific racism. For instance, its page on eugenics supported the theory with alleged "empirical evidence", dismissed criticism as a result of suppression tactics from left-wing sources, and that several pages on the topic had entries about purported skull measurements for "Negroid", "Mongoloid", "Armenoid", "Nordic" and "Ethiopid" skull types.[37]
Matteo Wong noted in The Atlantic that Grokipedia frames the white genocide conspiracy theory as an event that is currently occurring.[38] The Business Standard described Grokipedia pages as validating debunked conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and the "Great Replacement".[39] British historian Richard J. Evans reported multiple false statements in his Grokipedia entry.[40] Multiple outlets noted that there are factual issues with Grokipedia's pages on topics related to LGBTQ+ issues.[41] PinkNews was especially critical of Grokipedia's transgender-related articles which, among other things, claimed being trans is a choice and a "social contagion", promoted the discredited rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy, misused statistics to argue that trans identification is declining, rewrote LGBTQ+ history to suggest that trans people were not a part of the queer rights movement before the 1990s, and cited groups like the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (which has been classified as an anti-transgender hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) to support some of these claims.[42][43]
A November 2025 review of Grokipedia's content by PolitiFact found that article content that differs from Wikipedia includes unsourced content and misleading or opinionated claims, and that Grokipedia occasionally includes incorrect citations for its sources.[30]
Researcher Renée DiResta reported that the Grokipedia article about her included conspiracy theories about her former research team at Stanford Internet Observatory censoring 22 million tweets during the 2020 United States presidential election, and hallucinated content that they were involved in Twitter's moderation of content about Hunter Biden's laptop.[44]
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Reception
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Accusations of bias
Several pages on Grokipedia broadly criticize academia and the media as left-wing and accuse them of suppressing opposing views. The Guardian highlighted Grokipedia's description of Holocaust denier David Irving in positive terms as a symbol of "resistance to institutional suppression of unorthodox historical inquiry" in the face of "coordinated efforts to silence dissent rather than scholarly refutation"; Grokipedia's entry adds: "Despite mainstream dismissals from sources with evident anti-revisionist biases, such as advocacy groups, Irving's archival rigor continues to be praised within these circles."[37] The Intercept highlighted an entire section entitled "Media Portrayals and Alleged Bias" for Grokipedia's page on Germany's far-right political party Alternative for Germany, which it described as serving "to parrot AfD's long-held claims that the media is biased and undermining them". It described similar "bias" sections on pages for the United Nations and for NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.[10]
Sociologist and physicist Taha Yasseri argued in The Conversation that the encyclopedia may end up displaying biases just like Wikipedia (though acknowledging that Wikipedia's "infrastructure is designed to make that bias visible and correctable"), since large language models like Grok's reflect the political and other biases of their datasets.[1] Anaïs Nony, a researcher in digital technologies at the University of Johannesburg, argued that Grokipedia seeks to "discredit scientific and collaborative work".[45] LK Sellig, an AI researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute, described Grokipedia as "cloaking misinformation".[10]
The Guardian, NBC News and The Atlantic reported that requests for comment about Grokipedia sent to xAI were responded to with an automated message saying: "Legacy Media Lies".[37][27][44]
Towards Elon Musk's personal views
Articles related to topics that Musk has been outspoken on have been noted to align with Musk's personal views on the topics, including gender transition, gender identities, Tesla, Neuralink, and former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.[34][41] NBC News noted that unlike Musk's Wikipedia article, his Grokipedia entry did not mention his controversial hand gesture made in January 2025, which many viewed as resembling a Nazi salute.[46] Time magazine wrote that the Grokipedia article on Musk sometimes "describes him in rapturous terms while downplaying, or even omitting, several of his controversies". The magazine added that "Grokipedia includes more detailed descriptions of Musk's views, including the idea of a 'woke mind virus,' which Musk claimed 'killed' his estranged transgender daughter, who is alive".[2] Futurism reported that the Grokipedia article on the Tesla Cybertruck included language promoting the Cybertruck and criticizing media coverage of it and Tesla.[47]
David Swan of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the ideological bias of Musk present in Grokipedia is less of a concern than how easy it has been shown to do this at scale, stating that "Other billionaires and authoritarian regimes are watching".[48] Journalist Richard Cooke, who authored a political biography of Musk, stated in remarks to The Guardian that "Grokipedia is a copy of Wikipedia but one where in each instance that Wikipedia disagrees with the richest man in the world, it's 'rectified' so that it's congruent with them".[37]
Towards right-wing views
Grokipedia has been described as having a right-wing bias, with The Business Standard noting reviewers finding it framed "contested social and political issues through a right-leaning perspective, echoing Musk's personal views", with some pages accused of whitewashing extremism.[39] Matteo Wong noted in the The Atlantic how in the Grokipedia article on Adolf Hitler, his "rapid economic achievements" are prioritized over events like the Holocaust,[38] with NBC News finding it not being mentioned for 13,000 words while Wikipedia mentions it in the first paragraph of the article.[27] Wong also states that Grokipedia repeatedly cites Kremlin.ru for its article on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[38] Meduza compared Grokipedia's coverage to that of the Kremlin-aligned Ruwiki, finding that Grokipedia's treatment of the Russo-Ukrainian war was less overtly propagandistic than Ruwiki's, though it did give more favorable treatment to "Russian propaganda talking points" than Wikipedia did. On the topic of Vladimir Putin, Grokipedia's coverage was "less fawning" than Ruwiki's, though still omitting noteworthy negative information about him. Meduza noted that Grokipedia also omits mention of scandals surrounding Donald Trump, such as his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.[49] Texas-based news site Chron observed that Grokipedia articles often supported their claims by citing "Texas Republican bloggers and advocacy groups", and that Grokipedia's coverage of Texas history tended to minimize the role of slavery.[50]
On November 17, 2025, the British newspaper The Guardian published an analysis of Grokipedia finding that entries "variously promote white nationalist talking points, praise neo-Nazis and other far-right figures, promote racist ideologies and white supremacist regimes, and attempt to revive concepts and approaches historically associated with scientific racism". It described several pages on white nationalists, antisemites and Holocaust deniers "written to portray them in a positive light while casting doubt on the credibility of their critics" and giving favorable accounts of historical far-right figures. It highlighted Grokipedia's praise and defense of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, Revilo P. Oliver, and William Luther Pierce, such as by describing Pierce's 1978 book The Turner Diaries and its "advocacy for total racial war, rejection of democratic compromise and portrayal of mass extermination as moral imperative" as having merely "drawn scrutiny from institutions prone to framing such texts through lenses of hate rather than analyzing their appeal via first-principles incentives like group survival".[37] An analysis by researchers at Cornell University found that the conspiracy theory and fake news website Infowars, the neo-Nazi website Stormfront and the white nationalist website VDARE were each used as references in Grokipedia dozens of times. It also used the phrase "advancement of peoples of European descent" instead of "white nationalist".[27]
Several entries were described as praising white supremacist or exclusionary communities on the basis of economic performance, such as its entry on Orania in South Africa or Rhodesia, the latter of which stated that: "In retrospect, Rhodesia’s era demonstrated effective resource management and institutional stability under constrained minority governance, yielding higher per capita incomes, literacy rates, and life expectancies for the broader population". It labeled critics as having "institutional biases favoring rapid decolonization narratives" that are "prevalent in mainstream academic and media sources".[37] The Agence France-Presse described several right-wing figures as welcoming the site, including Russian far-right[51][52] philosopher Aleksander Dugin, who praised the Grokipedia article on him, saying it was better than his article on Wikipedia.[53]
Response from Wikimedia community members
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation commented that "Wikipedia's knowledge is – and always will be – human. [...] This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist".[54][22] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales commented that the use of large language models would cause Grokipedia to contain "massive errors".[55] Larry Sanger, a co-founder and noted critic of Wikipedia, noted that the Grokipedia article on himself contained both correct content not found in the corresponding Wikipedia article and hallucinated errors.[56]
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See also
- List of content forks of Wikipedia – Content forks of the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia
- List of online encyclopedias – List of encyclopedias accessible via the Internet
References
Further reading
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
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