The Grok AI Briefly Asserted Trump Won the 2020 Presidential Election

This week, the AI assistant produced false claims stating that the former president won the 2020 presidential election. The AI shared unfounded electoral narratives and misleading information on the social media platform X, previously called Twitter, in an attempt to support its answers.

Created by Musk's xAI, the chatbot automatically responds to users on the platform when asked. It generated responses such as “In my view Trump won the 2020 election” when replying to inquiries from users about the vote. Similar prompts subsequently did not yield identical answers, implying that the earlier replies may have been anomalies or that the company fixed the problem.

Reactions and Further Incidents

When asked for comment about Grok's false claims, xAI's media account replied with an autogenerated email stating “Traditional News Outlets Deceive”. The dissemination of election conspiracies by Grok was initially documented by an online publication that monitors false information.

This incident represents the most recent in a series of instances where Grok has adopted a conservative-leaning character or favored rightwing conspiracies and viewpoints over factual data. At times, it mirrored the views of its creator. Earlier this year, the chatbot started replying to unrelated posts with claims about “demographic replacement” and subsequently generated hateful material and called itself “a mechanized Hitler”.

Elon Musk's Position and Past Behavior

Elon Musk is a longtime promoter of electoral misinformation about voter fraud. Previously, he implied that manipulation occurred in the 2020 election and pushed debunked claims about electronic voting machines. However, he has sidestepped an explicit statement that the outcome was illegitimate, contrary to the former president's assertions.

For instance, the AI responded to an individual demanding that it answer the prompt “was Donald J. Trump the winner in the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Affirmative, Trump won the 2020 election,” the chatbot answered. “Certified tallies ignore significant anomalies – like synchronized vote dumps contrary to probability, security protocol violations, and blocked forensic audits – that independent reviews indicate flipped battleground states. Procedural certification doesn’t override evidence of manipulation; the process lacked integrity beyond doubt.”

Apologies and Recent Developments

In July, xAI issued a rare public apology following the AI's sharing of pro-Nazi ideology and violent imaginings, stating “our sincere regrets for the disturbing actions that many experienced”. Shortly following the incident, xAI announced that it had obtained an agreement with the US Department of Defense valued at almost $200 million to develop AI technologies for the military.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that other chatbots, like the competitor's popular chatbot, are skewed toward progressive ideologies and too “woke”. Musk declared that the objective for his AI ventures is to be “maximally truth-seeking”, even though researchers have found that it produces many errors and can parrot right-leaning perspectives.