Billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday announced plans to create “Grokipedia,” an artificial intelligence-driven alternative to the world’s most popular online reference source, Wikipedia. The project will be developed by his AI company, xAI, with the stated goal of creating a less biased and more accurate knowledge resource.

“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Mr. Musk said in a post on his social media platform, X. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”

The announcement came in response to a post by a tech investor, David Sacks, who criticized Wikipedia for what he described as its systemic bias.

“Wikipedia is hopelessly biased,” Mr. Sacks wrote. “An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”

Mr. Sacks’s comments were prompted by an interview between Tucker Carlson and a co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. Mr. Sanger, who has become a vocal critic of the platform he helped create, detailed how Wikipedia categorizes news outlets, creating a list of approved and “blacklisted” sources.

According to Mr. Sanger, approved sources include the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, NPR, and CNN. Sources that are blacklisted or “deprecated” include Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Caller, the Federalist and the Epoch Times. “So, you can’t use those as sources on Wikipedia,” Mr. Sanger said.

Mr. Sacks is not alone in his criticism. A study conducted in 2024 by the Manhattan Institute suggested that Wikipedia exhibits a political bias against right-leaning public figures. The research indicates that the online encyclopedia often uses more negative language when discussing right-of-center individuals compared to their left-of-center counterparts.

The pattern, according to the study, was observed across various categories, including “U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, congressmembers, state governors, leaders of Western countries, and prominent U.S.-based journalists and media organizations.”

The study also highlighted an emotional bias in the language used. Researchers found “prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures.”

Mr. Musk has been a long-time critic of Wikipedia. In October 2023, he offered to donate $1 billion to the platform if it changed its name to “Dickipedia,” a move intended to highlight his frustration with its content and editorial practices. He has also publicly feuded with a Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, over issues of transparency and neutrality.

The concept behind Grokipedia appears to be based on leveraging the AI models from xAI, such as its Grok chatbot. Mr. Musk has previously mentioned that these tools are being designed to identify and correct errors in online content. These “synthetic corrections,” he suggests, could form the basis of a new database that aims to eliminate what he perceives as errors and ideological bias present in Wikipedia.

However, creating a purely objective, AI-generated encyclopedia presents its own challenges. A 2024 study on AI chatbots found that while they perform well on simple, fact-based queries, they often struggle with complex questions, showing issues with faulty reasoning and an inability to cite valid references.

This is not the first time AI has caused friction within the Wikipedia community. In June 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment with AI-generated article summaries following strong objections from its volunteer editors.