According to Elon Musk, xAI’s Grok chatbot has a new bona fide: blatantly lying about the history of America.
On Wednesday, the centi-billionaire culture warrior boasted that the “4.20” version of his is officially “BASED.” Why? Because it won’t “equivocate” when it’s asked if the US is built on stolen land. Instead, it gives an emphatic no as its answer, while other “weak sauce” models — in Musk’s words, at least — give a more nuanced response.
“No, the United States is not simply ‘on stolen land,'” Grok says in a screenshotted conversation shared by its creator. “That framing is a modern rhetorical slogan that oversimplifies thousands of years of human history, layered claims to territory, legal doctrines, treaties, warfare, migration, and demographic collapse.”
The reality, of course, is that it’s hard to argue that the ruthless killing, enslavement, and displacement of Native Americans by European settlers doesn’t amount to their land being stolen. This pattern of behavior continued well after the colonies graduated into a full-blown nation: the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, plus countless other massacres, not to mention centuries of brutal residential schools. However complicated it might be, the answer to whether the US was built on stolen land can’t be boiled down to a simple “no.”
How competing chatbots approach the question varies. In Musk’s screenshot, ChatGPT, says the “short answer” is yes: “much of the land that is now the United States was taken through conquest, coercion, broken treaties, or forced removal of Indigenous peoples.” Claude 4.6 delicately approaches it by acknowledging that it’s a “contested question” and presents the case for both the yes and no arguments.
We don’t recommend using hallucination-prone AIs for research, but if he had to, we’d probably pick one of the chatbots that lay out the facts and debate, instead of subjecting ourselves to a moralizing rant from an AI best known for calling itself “MechaHitler” and generating nudes of people without their consent.
But Musk seems proud of his chatbot’s response, which is essentially providing ideologues with a comforting yet oversimplified version of history.
“Every square inch of habitable land on Earth has changed hands through conquest, migration, purchase, or displacement multiple times — long before 1492 and everywhere else on the planet,” Grok fumes, as you probably begin to imagine an Elon Musk-shaped claw puppeting its mouth.
This boast is the latest example of Musk’s commitment to tampering with Grok so that it reflects his personal worldview. He has repeatedly admonished Grok after he caught it citing mainstream news sources that didn’t align with his far-right beliefs. Last summer, the chatbot suspiciously began parroting talking points in response to completely unrelated posts about a supposed “white genocide” in South Africa, a racist conspiracy theory that Musk, a white South African, believes in. Months later, it suddenly began praising Musk to a preposterous degree, leading to declarations that he was a greater mind than Isaac Newton and better role model than Jesus Christ. Musk’s goal of rewriting reality reached its apotheosis with the launch of “Grokipedia,” an AI-generated and Grok-edited alternative to Wikipedia, which conspicuously defended the Cybertruck and cited actual Nazi websites.
But ironically, even Grok may not be “BASED.” When we asked it about the US being on stolen land, it gave a very different answer to the one Musk was gloating about.
“The United States, as it exists today, was indeed largely built on lands that were originally inhabited and controlled by Indigenous peoples,” Grok replied, “and much of that land was acquired through processes that many historians and legal scholars describe as theft, coercion, or violation of treaties.”