Elon Musk’s Wikipedia alternative, Grokipedia, cites the neo-Nazi website Stormfront 42 times and relies heavily on other sources that experts have deemed unreliable or extremist, according to a comprehensive analysis by Cornell Tech researchers.
The study, conducted by Harold Triedman and Alexios Mantzarlis, represents the first attempt to systematically analyze Grokipedia’s more than 880,000 articles since the platform launched in October 2025. The researchers successfully scraped 883,858 articles, representing 99.8% of Grokipedia’s content at the time.
Extremist and Conspiracy Sources
Beyond Stormfront, the researchers found that Grokipedia cites conspiracy theory website Infowars 34 times and white nationalist publication VDare 107 times. Wikipedia does not cite any of these sources, as they have been blacklisted or deemed generally unreliable by the Wikipedia community.
Stormfront, created by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black in 1995, is considered the first major hate site on the internet and the most popular forum for white nationalists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The site has been linked to numerous acts of violence, including several mass shootings.
VDare, founded by Peter Brimelow in 1999, has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for promoting white nationalist content and anti-immigrant messaging.
Source Quality Comparison
The Cornell researchers found that overall, 5.5% of Grokipedia articles include at least one citation to a source that Wikipedia has blacklisted — a ninefold increase compared to Wikipedia. For articles without a Creative Commons license, which tend to diverge more from Wikipedia content, the figure jumps to 11.7%, representing a 13-times increase.
“The guardrails are off,” Triedman, a computer science graduate student at Cornell, told NBC News. “The publicly determined, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source are not in application on Grokipedia.”
Using academic source reliability ratings, the researchers found that Grokipedia includes 12,522 citations to domains deemed to have very low credibility, citing these low-quality sources three times as often as Wikipedia.
Political and Controversial Articles Most Affected
The analysis found that articles about controversial topics and elected officials showed the greatest divergence from Wikipedia and the heaviest reliance on unreliable sources.
Among controversial topics, 85.5% of Grokipedia articles contain at least one citation to a source Wikipedia considers “generally unreliable,” and 21.7% cite sources that have been blacklisted entirely.
The Grokipedia article about VDare itself cites Stormfront seven times, while the equivalent Wikipedia article relies on mainstream sources like Newsweek. The Grokipedia version also uses euphemisms such as “advancement of peoples of European descent” instead of labels like “white nationalist” used by Wikipedia editors.
Platform Differences
Unlike Wikipedia, which relies on volunteer community editors to maintain content standards, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process through xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. Users can suggest edits, but xAI controls whether changes are approved, with the Grok AI chatbot reportedly playing a role in the review process.
The research paper, published as a preprint on arXiv, has not yet undergone formal peer review but represents the most comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia to date. The authors have publicly released their data and methodology for verification.
Musk launched Grokipedia as an alternative to what he called “Wokipedia,” claiming Wikipedia has a left-wing bias. Neither Musk nor xAI responded to requests for comment on the Cornell analysis.
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