Elon Musk is partnering with the government of El Salvador to bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country, according to a Thursday announcement by xAI. Over the next two years, the plan is to “deploy” the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an “AI-powered education program”.
xAI’s Grok is more known for referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and espousing far-right conspiracy theories than it is for public education. Over the past year, the chatbot has spewed various antisemitic content, decried “white genocide” and claimed Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, is now entrusting the chatbot to create curricula in classrooms across the country. Bukele has long embraced technology, making El Salvador the first county in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, and being one of the first Central American presidents to use Twitter, now X, as a platform. He is also known for ruling with an iron fist and working with Trump to incarcerate deportees to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison.
“El Salvador doesn’t just wait for the future to happen; we build it,” Bukele said in a statement about the partnership with xAI. “This partnership is destined to deliver something rather extraordinary for all of humanity.”
Musk touted his partnership with Bukele on Thursday. On X, between posts about “white genocide” and blaming asylum seekers for crime, Musk posted comments about Grok being spread throughout El Salvador’s schools.
He reposted positively to a comment from Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, in which she wrote: “If we are serious about restoring education to math, science and English – why would we allow left leaning liberal [sic] AI our kids? This unlocks non-woke educational tools for our kids.”
xAI is not the first artificial intelligence company to introduce chatbots to public schools. OpenAI announced a partnership with Estonia in February where it could provide all students and teachers in the country’s secondary school system with a customized ChatGPT. Students in rural Colombia also started using Meta’s AI chatbots in 2023 and within a year, teachers began blaming the tech for low grades and failing exams, according to Rest of World.
