Something interesting happened over the weekend when an Australian data scientist noticed that Anthropic's AI was doing something unusual: citing Grokipedia instead of Wikipedia.

The Discovery

Jeremy Howard, who co-founded fast.ai, caught the shift while working with Anthropic's search API. He posted on X wondering if Anthropic had cut some kind of deal with xAI's Grok. His observation was that "Anthropic API today for me started citing Grokipedia sources when using its search tool, even although Wikipedia results are higher in search engines for these queries."

It's a fair question. Why would an AI tool skip over the top-ranked search results to cite a newer, smaller encyclopedia?

Musk's Response

Elon Musk jumped in to clarify the situation. The answer, as it turns out, is pretty straightforward. "Grokipedia.com is open source and free to be used by anyone with no royalty or even acknowledgement required," he explained.

So there's no secret agreement here. Anyone can pull from Grokipedia without asking permission or paying fees. Musk added that the company simply encourages users to correct any errors they find, which helps improve accuracy across the platform over time.

The Bigger Picture

Musk launched Grokipedia in October as a direct competitor to Wikipedia. He's been critical of Wikipedia for what he considers bias and has previously urged people to stop donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The new platform is growing quickly. Grokipedia currently hosts more than 1.08 million articles. That's still a fraction of Wikipedia's more than seven million English-language entries, but it's notable growth for a platform that's only been live for a few weeks.

The open-source approach could be key to Grokipedia's strategy. By making it free and accessible to AI tools without restrictions, Musk is essentially removing barriers to adoption that might slow down a Wikipedia alternative.