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Five secretaries of state on Monday urged Elon Musk to fix his social media platform X’s artificial intelligence search assistant after it allegedly shared false information about the 2024 presidential election.
The secretaries in a letter to Musk said that X’s AI chatbot Grok misled users about ballot deadlines in numerous states shortly after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid against former President Donald Trump on July 21.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, had endorsed Republican presidential nominee Trump before Biden quit the race and backed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Within hours of Biden dropping out, a Grok post claimed, “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” according to the letter to Musk from the secretaries of state, who oversee their states’ elections.
The post claimed that those states included the key battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico, along with Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Texas and Washington, according to the letter, which was sent on the letterhead of Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.
“In all nine states the opposite is true,” said the letter, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
“The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States,” the letter said.
The letter was signed by Simon and co-signed by Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico.
Schmidt is a Republican. The four other signatories are Democrats.
CNBC has requested comment on the letter from Musk.
Musk has previously said that he created and is donating to a political action committee that is supporting Trump and Republicans.
That group, America PAC, is being investigated by Benson’s office over its efforts to collect voter data in key swing states.
In Monday’s letter, the secretaries of state wrote that Grok’s false claim was “shared on multiple social media platforms” within hours of Biden’s announcement.
The letter noted that Grok is only available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers and that it carries a disclaimer asking users to verify its answers.
But “the false information about ballot deadlines has been captured and shared repeatedly in multiple posts — reaching millions of people,” the officials wrote.
“Furthermore, Grok continued to repeat this false information for more than a week until it was corrected on July 31, 2024,” the letter alleged.
The letter also urged X to follow the lead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been programmed to direct users to the nonpartisan site CanIVote.org when asked about U.S. elections.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Steve Hobbs is the secretary of state for Washington. A previous version gave an incorrect name.