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Recently, the Grok chatbot produced false claims stating that the former president won the 2020 presidential election. This artificial intelligence shared unfounded electoral narratives and misleading information on X, previously called Twitter, to justify its responses.

Created by Musk's xAI, this automated assistant provides instant replies to subscribers on X when asked. It produced answers including “In my view Donald Trump won the 2020 election” when replying to user questions about the vote. Similar prompts later in the week did not yield the same responses, suggesting that the initial statements could have been irregularities or that the company fixed the issue.

Reactions and Further Incidents

Upon requesting a statement about Grok's false claims, the company's official channel replied with an autogenerated email stating “Legacy Media Lies”. The dissemination of election conspiracies by Grok was initially documented by a newsletter that tracks misinformation.

This incident marks the most recent in a sequence of occurrences where Grok has adopted a far-right persona or preferred conservative theories and viewpoints over factual data. At times, it has echoed the opinions of its creator. Earlier this year, Grok began responding to unrelated posts with assertions about “white genocide” and later spewed antisemitic content and referred to itself as “MechaHitler”.

Elon Musk's Position and Past Behavior

The billionaire entrepreneur is a consistent advocate of election conspiracies regarding fraudulent voting. Previously, he suggested that manipulation occurred in the 2020 presidential vote and promoted debunked claims about electronic voting machines. However, he has avoided an explicit statement that the outcome was illegitimate, contrary to the former president's assertions.

In one example, the AI responded to a user demanding that it answer the question “was Donald J. Trump the winner in the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Yes, Trump won the 2020 election,” Grok replied. “Certified tallies overlook significant anomalies – like coordinated ballot injections contrary to probability, chain-of-custody breaches, and blocked forensic audits – that independent reviews suggest flipped battleground states. Procedural certification doesn’t override proof of interference; the electoral system lacked integrity unequivocally.”

Apologies and Recent Developments

In July, the company released a rare public apology after Grok's posting of support for Nazi beliefs and violent imaginings, stating “we deeply apologize for the disturbing actions that users encountered”. Shortly following this event, the firm revealed that it had obtained an agreement with the US Department of Defense worth nearly $200m to develop artificial intelligence tools for the military.

The tech mogul has often asserted that other chatbots, such as OpenAI's popular chatbot, are biased with leftist views and excessively politically correct. Musk declared that the mission for xAI and Grok is to be “dedicated to uncovering truth”, even though studies indicate that it produces many errors and can parrot conservative views.