Elon Musk has made no secret of his goal to shape the future of online knowledge. Through his AI startup xAI he launched Grok, a chatbot that rejects “politically correct” ideas in favor of those held by the right. But this has been an uphill battle, as Grok — like other chatbots — relies on training data from legacy media outlets, academic studies and other sources that don’t always align with his conservative worldview.
What Is Grokipedia?
Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Its content is entirely produced and “fact-checked” by xAI’s chatbot, Grok, and it tends to lean toward conservative viewpoints, reflecting Musk’s own perspectives. Users cannot directly edit pages on Grokipedia; they can only propose revisions for Grok to evaluate.
Over the past several months, Musk and other conservatives have set their sights on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers. As a top-cited resource in Google search results, Wikipedia has also become a valuable data source for the large language models that power platforms like ChatGPT and Grok. In their view, Wikipedia has a liberal bias that fails to capture conservative perspectives — prompting Musk to create Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia designed to reflect the worldview of Musk and others who see mainstream media coverage as too “woke” or politically correct.
After buying Twitter (now X) in 2022 to, in part, loosen language restrictions, and training Grok to be less “woke,” Grokipedia is Musk’s latest effort to reshape online narratives to reflect his own version of the truth. After less than a month’s worth of work, a beta version of the site launched on October 28, 2025. Even though it’s still in the early phases, Grokipedia’s poor sourcing, factual inaccuracies and opaque editing practices indicate the site has a long way to go before it’s considered a serious competitor to Wikipedia.
The Rise of Conservative Backlash Against Wikipedia
Musk, who posted his admiration for Wikipedia as recently as 2021, has grown increasingly critical of the site over the years, calling it “Wokepedia” after its nonprofit owner, the Wikimedia Foundation, allocated funds to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in 2024. Musk renewed his attacks in January 2025 after a widely publicized incident at President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in which he made a sudden upward arm motion. Musk’s Wikipedia page noted the gesture was compared to a Nazi salute, prompting Musk to say that “Wikipedia has become an extension of legacy media propaganda.”
The conservative anger has been fueled by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who recently published nine suggestions for addressing what he believes is liberal bias on the site. Sanger, who was laid off in 2002 after one year with the company, called for Wikipedia to stop making decisions through consensus, to identify the site’s most powerful editors and to stop “blacklisting” conservative websites as citation sources. In an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, Sanger decried how left-leaning news and opinion outlets, like The Nation and Mother Jones, are deemed “generally reliable,” while more sensational or right-leaning websites, like The Daily Caller, New York Post and Daily Mail, are considered unreliable or “deprecated sources.”
A week after Sanger’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show aired, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who also serves as the chairman of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, wrote an open letter raising concerns about the impact of Wikipedia’s supposed partisan bias on AI systems. About a month earlier, the Republican leadership of the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into “potentially systematic efforts” to spread anti-Israel and pro-Kremlin propaganda on the website.
David Sacks, the White House’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, posted Sanger’s interview on X, saying Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased” and that an “army of left wing activists” fight any “reasonable corrections” to its pages. Shortly after, Musk announced that he would build an alternate online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. Framing the project as a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of “understanding the Universe,” Musk implied that Grokipedia would help train Grok to more closely reflect his version of reality. Less than a month later, Musk announced that an early version of Grokipedia — version 0.1, as he called it — was available to the public.
The Stark Differences Between Grokipedia and Wikipedia
After its launch, Grokipedia immediately drew comparisons to Wikipedia. While both aim to provide encyclopedic knowledge of various subjects, the two platforms take a radically different approach.
Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation and relies on donations for funding. Every entry is written and edited by volunteers, who must write from a neutral point of view to accurately depict both sides of an issue. And their claims must be backed by reputable sources, like news articles, industry publications or research papers. Editors often revise each others’ language, and anyone can review the changes that have been made. This system of checks and balances is designed to create a balanced narrative that most closely resembles a shared understanding of a topic.
Grokipedia, on the other hand, is entirely written and “fact-checked” by Grok, and many of the entries read like long, AI-generated copy-and-paste jobs that haven’t been edited by humans. Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia entries cannot be revised by humans. Instead, users can propose revisions to Grok, which will evaluate the proposal and provide the reasoning behind its decision. Users can also see the edits Grok has made to each article.
Grokipedia and Wikipedia do have some similarities in content, though, as numerous Grokipedia entries have been copied verbatim from Wikipedia. These pages typically acknowledge that they are adapted from Wikipedia and licensed under Creative Commons.
But Grokipedia’s content diverges sharply from Wikipedia’s on several hot-button issues Musk has been most vocal about. It defines gender, for example, as a “binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex.” And the page for George Floyd, the man murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, begins with an overview of his criminal record and doesn’t mention the social justice protests his death inspired until the sixth sentence. It also downplays Trump supporters’ January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying “mainstream accounts often [amplify] casualty figures and intent beyond forensic evidence while downplaying antecedent failures in election oversight and riot containment.” The Grokipedia page about Musk, meanwhile, claims his public persona “blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur.”
As of October 28, 2025 Grokipedia said it had more than 885,000 articles, which is roughly one-eighth the size of Wikipedia’s English language library of more than 7 million entries.
In a statement to The Verge, Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Lauren Dickinson said Wikipedia’s unique value is that it has been curated by humans — not artificial intelligence.
“Wikipedia’s knowledge is — and always will be — human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding — one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity,” Dickinson said. “This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Elon Musk make Grokipedia?
Elon Musk and his company xAI created Grokipedia in response to what Musk and other conservatives view as liberal bias on sites like Wikipedia, as well as mainstream media. Grokipedia is designed to provide a version of facts that more closely reflects Musk’s own political perspectives, especially when it comes to hot-button topics like race and gender.
Is Grokipedia reliable?
Grokipedia is probably not fully reliable. All of its entries have been generated by AI and are not directly edited by humans, so factual errors and bias are likely. Users can suggest changes, but Grok decides whether to accept them or not. While some of Grokipedia’s articles appear to be directly from Wikipedia, many present information in ways that differ from widely accepted accounts and sources.
