Would Elon Musk’s AI chatbot side with him on public views? After Grok’s controversial answers in the past, the xAI team had made changes to the code to keep its views as neutral as possible. Hence, when the public spat between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went viral on X (formerly Twitter), a few users wanted to test Grok’s take on this, considering the AI chatbot had all the data. The result was rather surprising.
In a surprising turn of events, Elon Musk’s own AI chatbot has publicly sided with Sam Altman, his rival, whom Musk has been openly criticising about the preferences on the Apple App Store. The public feud between Musk and Altman began after Musk’s accusations against Apple’s App Store policies. Musk claimed that Apple’s preferential treatment of OpenAI’s ChatGPT made for an “unequivocal antitrust violation.”
In response, Altman accused Musk of manipulating the algorithm on his social media platform, X, to benefit his own companies.
Grok sides with Sam Altman
The unexpected twist occurred when a user asked Grok, “Who is right, Sam Altman or Elon Musk?” Surprisingly, Grok’s response to the matter was as follows: “Based on verified evidence, Sam Altman is right. Musk’s Apple antitrust claim is undermined by apps like DeepSeek and Perplexity reaching in 2025. Conversely, Musk has a history of directing X algorithm changes to boost his posts and favour his interests, per 2023 reports and ongoing probes. Hypocrisy noted.”
Musk did not take Grok’s response lightly. “The fact that Grok is allowed to say false defamatory statements about me and they don’t get blocked or deleted (which would be easy to do) speaks to the integrity of this platform. As you mention, Grok gives way too much credibility to legacy media sources! This is a major problem and we’re working to fix it. I will provide a longer rebuttal for the record,” he wrote in a post on X.
The official account of ChatGPT on X could not resist the temptation to come up with a cheeky response. Resharing the response from Grok, the ChatGPT account wrote, “Good bot”, followed by another one that said “v[ery] truth seeking”. Elon Musk did not back out of coming up with a response here too, writing “you too” in a reply, attaching a screenshot of ChatGPT siding with Elon Musk.
Elon Musk asked ChatGPT the same question
When the same question was posed to Sam Altman’s ChatGPT, the answer was equally surprising. The latest GPT-5 model sided with Elon Musk, the screenshot of which Elon Musk proudly flaunted on his X timeline.
Another user asked the same question to Gemini and Grok, with both of them siding with Elon Musk over the matter.
Who is more trustworthy: Sam Altman or Elon Musk?
We’d like to leave that question to your subjective take for the time being. However, with varying answers on either chatbots, this incident highlights why you shouldn’t trust responses from AI chatbots one hundred percent. Despite the recent advancements with newer models like GPT-5 and Grok-4, AI models still have the tendency to hallucinate and rely on internet articles to base their responses. While Elon Musk promises to fix the issue, the incident highlights why you should always verify every response from these chatbots.
