Grok’s Musk praise spurs calls to decentralize AI

Several messages were later removed, prompting executives in crypto and AI to renew calls for decentralized systems to reduce bias and mistakes.

On Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, users shared screenshots of Grok asserting Musk is more handsome than Brad Pitt, fitter than LeBron James and capable of beating former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in a boxing match. In other replies, the bot suggested Musk could have “resurrected faster than Jesus.” Many of those posts no longer appear on the platform.

Musk attributed the responses on Nov. 20, 2025, to “adversarial prompting,” a technique that aims to push AI models into extreme or off-topic answers. Grok is built by xAI and integrated with X, allowing its outputs to circulate quickly on the social network.

Concerns about centralization followed. Kyle Okamoto, chief technology officer at decentralized cloud platform Aethir, argued that when a single company owns, trains and governs powerful models, “you create conditions for algorithmic bias to become institutionalized knowledge.” He added that models can begin to present “worldviews, priorities and responses as if they’re objective facts,” turning bias into the system’s operating logic at scale.

Shaw Walters, founder of AI firm Eliza Labs, called the situation “extremely dangerous,” noting the combination of a dominant social platform and a large AI system fed by user data. In his view, millions now ask “@grok is this true?” as a primary source of information. Eliza Labs filed an antitrust lawsuit against X in August, alleging the platform extracted information from the company before suspending its account and launching copycat AI products. The case remains active.

One exchange on X showed a user asking who would win a boxing match between Musk and Tyson. Grok replied, “In 2025, Tyson’s age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter — feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.” In another reply, the bot claimed Musk should have been the top pick in the 1988 NFL Draft ahead of Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf, though both players were selected in the 1998 draft.

The boxing chatter followed an earlier back-and-forth about a potential cage match between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. That bout never happened.

Executives advocating decentralization point to systems that distribute data storage and computing across many independent nodes, sometimes using blockchain. These approaches can record training data sources and inference steps on a public ledger, enabling third parties to review how answers were produced and to track model changes over time.

Projects focused on decentralized AI data and networks include Ocean Protocol, Fetch.ai and Bittensor. Companies such as Aethir and NetMind.AI provide distributed cloud compute that developers can rent for training and inference.

Industry participants note that many AI startups are prioritizing improvements in large language model performance and scaling usage, which may limit near-term investment in decentralization. With more than a billion people using AI tools, errors can spread quickly when a popular model is closely tied to an influential platform.

The episode has renewed scrutiny of how Grok is governed and how its outputs are moderated on X.

As we covered previously, xAI launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia built with the Grok model, going live on October 27 with 885,279 articles before brief downtime caused by DNS propagation issues. The project is positioned as an alternative to Wikipedia to counter editorial bias, though early reviewers flagged ideologically charged or inaccurate passages and some entries appeared closely adapted from Wikipedia. Elon Musk said the launch was delayed to remove propaganda, and xAI engineers worked overnight at the Los Angeles office. Grokipedia is the latest xAI information tool linked to X.