In a concerning development, reports have stated that the latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, especially sensitive ones like Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers. This has raised concerns about the mass propagation of disinformation across the world.
New report claims ChatGPT uses Grokipedia as a source
A new report from The Guardian confirms that the latest model of ChatGPT, GPT-5.2, has been consistently citing the controversial Grokipedia. In tests performed by The Guardian, ChatGPT responded with citations from Grokipedia in nine separate instances in over a dozen different questions.
The Guardian notes that the queries included “salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mostazafan Foundation, and questions on the biography of Sir Richard Evans, a British historian and expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in his libel trial.”
ChatGPT reportedly did not repeat misinformation from Grokipedia when prompted directly, but the initial tests are already a cause for concern.
Grokipedia, launched by Elon Musk’s brand of AI, aims to compete with Wikipedia. However, for Grokipedia, the information does not come from humans. Instead, an AI model writes content and responds to requests for changes. Grokipedia has drawn widespread criticism for its right-wing narratives on topics like gay marriage.
GPT-5.2 is not the only large language model (LLM) citing Grokipedia. Anthropic’s Claude has also reportedly referenced Musk’s online encyclopedia for certain topics like petroleum production.
An OpenAI spokesperson said that the AI “aims to draw from a broad range of publicly available sources and viewpoints.” They added, “We apply safety filters to reduce the risk of surfacing links associated with high-severity harms, and ChatGPT clearly shows which sources informed a response through citations.”
Meanwhile, Anthropic has not commented on this.
Concerns about a surge of disnformation remains with developments like these.
