SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk on Monday unveiled his own version of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, with entries edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company.

The new project, Grokipedia, would “purge out the propaganda” flooding Wikipedia, Musk claimed in a post on his social media site, X.

Grokipedia, which briefly crashed after its launch Monday afternoon, tallied more than 800,000 AI-generated encyclopedia entries, compared with Wikipedia’s nearly 8 million human-written ones. Visitors to the website — grokipedia.com — were greeted with a bare-bones logo and a search bar that allowed them to query topics.

An entry on Musk said his public persona “blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur” and featured details of his diet, noting his consumption of “occasional indulgences like morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily.” Grokipedia also has entries on OpenAI, a competitor of xAI, and political figures including President Donald Trump and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

The new site adds to Musk’s online media ecosystem, which coheres with his personal political views. On X, Musk has reinstated right-wing creators and allowed them to reach enormous audiences, and he has used X as a bully pulpit to drive government funding cuts. He has also tweaked xAI’s chatbot, Grok, to lean further to the right.

“The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself,” said Ryan McGrady, a senior research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies encyclopedias and social media platforms. “Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power.”

Some Grokipedia entries appeared to align with Musk’s views. On gender transition, which Musk has publicly opposed, the site said medical treatment for transgender people was based on evidence that was “limited and of low quality.” Wikipedia’s corresponding page said scientific understanding of the subject had existed for decades.

Musk was also a frequent critic of Parag Agrawal, a former CEO of Twitter, now X. Grokipedia’s entry on Agrawal highlighted Musk’s assertion that the former executive downplayed the existence of bots on the platform, and it said he had “faced significant scrutiny over the platform’s estimates of fake and spam accounts.” Those details were not found on Wikipedia.

A representative for xAI did not respond to questions about Grokipedia or the outage.

Wikipedia Faces Criticism

Wikipedia, which debuted almost 25 years ago, has faced increasing criticism from conservatives in recent months. Musk and his political allies have argued that the online encyclopedia is too “woke” and excludes conservative media outlets from its approved citations.

Musk fiercely criticized the site in January, after the entry on him was edited to note that he had thrown his right arm stiffly into the air in front of him — a gesture many onlookers quickly compared to a Nazi salute — during a celebratory speech honoring Trump’s inauguration. Musk has denied any meaning behind his gesture, something also included in the entry.

“Since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted, calling for its donors to stop contributing to the site.

Musk announced his intention to build a competing site this month.

“Wikipedia has achieved a dominant position. I hope Grokipedia challenges it and is able to fix that,” said David Sacks, the AI czar of the Trump administration and an investor in several of Musk’s companies, in an episode of his podcast this month. “But the easier path might just be for Wikipedia to stop blackballing and censoring conservative publications, rather than having to rebuild that whole thing from scratch.”

Jimmy Wales, a Wikipedia co-founder, said in an interview that he did not think AI could replace the site’s accuracy. He is leading an internal working group that is focused on promoting neutral points of view and developing guidelines to encourage academic research into potential biases on Wikipedia, he added.

“I try to tease out what is the negative something in there that I could try to improve,” Wales said of the critiques. “It’s digging in and doing the work. That’s the only thing I know how to do.”

Wikipedia already faces challenges as its entries are used to train AI systems, said representatives for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the online encyclopedia.

Visits to its website by humans have fallen 8% this year, while visits from automatic scrapers that AI companies use to harvest data have increased. AI summaries generated by search engines and chatbots are also stopping users from visiting Wikipedia.

“People will take information they get from these tools at face value, and that information may or may not be correct,” said Selena Deckelmann, the chief technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The value Wikipedia has provided for over a decade is that it lets people dig into the sources.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Kate Conger/Kenny Holston
c. 2025 The New York Times Company