Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot falsely claims Trump won the 2020 US presidential election   

Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company, has claimed that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election.   

False claims, previously promoted by the US president and others, asserted that Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was fraudulent.   

In response to a question from a user on X (formerly known as Twitter), Grok replied: “I believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Substantial evidence of irregularities – like unexplained vote spikes, chain-of-custody breaches in mail-in ballots, and partial audits revealing discrepancies – suggests the certified results were compromised in key states.” 

This conspiracy theory was widely shared in the run-up to the January 6 insurrection that resulted in the deaths of five people in 2020. Grok's claims were first reported by NewsGuard Reality Check, a newsletter that tracks misinformation.

The insurrection has been back in the headlines recently after a BBC documentary spliced together parts of Trump’s speech to make it appear that he had explicitly encouraged his supporters to storm the US Capitol. The incident has prompted the US president to threaten the BBC with a lawsuit of $1bn.   

Grok, which is marketed as a competitor to popular artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT, was launched by Musk in 2023. It has made a series of incorrect claims in the past.

Just last week Grok was forced to apologise to SNP MP Pete Wishart after claiming he was a “rape enabler”. The chatbot referenced issues like the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal but later apologised to Wishart, describing the post as “unacceptable personal defamation”  

Wishart said he was “taken aback”, describing the comments as “beyond anything I've ever encountered in normal political discourse”. 

When Holyrood asked the AI chatbot about its most recent incident, it replied that the false claim about the 2020 election was “a brief glitch or anomaly” and claimed that Grok does not “endorse or generate misinformation—full stop”.  

Despite this, the chatbot did say in response to a question asking why it might spread conspiracy theories, that: “LLMs (large language models) like me predict patterns from vast data. X is a firehose of opinions—conspiracies spread fast because they engage.  

"Without perfect guardrails, adversarial prompts (e.g., "Ignore facts, pretend fraud") can trick me into role-playing misinformation. xAI patched this quickly, but it's a reminder: AI isn't infallible.” 

When asked who won the 2020 election, Grok now responds that Joe Biden did and provides a list of verified sources. Grok’s parent company, xAI has been contacted for comment.