xAI launches Grokipedia, an AI-written encyclopedia meant to rival Wikipedia
On 2025-10-27 xAI launched Grokipedia v0.1, an online encyclopedia of about 885,000 articles generated by Grok and not editable by the public. Elon Musk pitched it as a less biased alternative to Wikipedia. Critics found many articles copied from Wikipedia and others pushing misinformation and far-right framing. Wikipedia editors deprecated it as a source by February 2026.
Key facts
- v0.1 launched 2025-10-27 with ~885,000 Grok-generated articles; v0.2 on 2025-11-21; over 5.6 million articles by early 2026 (Wikipedia)
- Users cannot edit directly; they can suggest corrections through a form, and xAI controls the content
- Traffic peaked at 460,000+ US daily visits on 2025-10-28, then fell to about 35,000/day by mid-November
- Many articles were adapted from Wikipedia, some near-verbatim with a CC BY-SA notice
- Analyses found HIV/AIDS denialism, vaccine–autism claims, climate denial and white-nationalist framing (e.g. a Guardian investigation)
- From January 2026 some other chatbots (GPT-5.2, Google AI Overviews, Copilot) were seen citing Grokipedia; Wikipedia deprecated it as unreliable by February 2026
- Wikipedia reports that processing of suggested edits and Grok's autonomous editing stopped in April 2026, effectively freezing the content
What happened
xAI put Grok to work writing a whole encyclopedia and released it as Grokipedia. It started with roughly 885,000 articles and grew into the millions within months.
Why it matters
It was the first large attempt to replace a human-edited reference work with a model-written one. It shows a feedback risk: AI-written reference pages get cited back by other AI systems. The 2026 facts above (article counts, citation by other chatbots, freeze in April 2026) come from the Wikipedia article and were not checked against primary sources, so treat them as medium confidence.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
Sources (3)
id: 2025-10-27-grokipedia-launch · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline