Elon Musk’s company xAI is partnering with the government of El Salvador to launch the first national AI-based education program, offering personalized tutoring to more than one million students in over 5,000 public schools.

El Salvador has a clear appetite for new technologies, an interest largely embodied by its president, Nayib Bukele, one of their most fervent supporters. A few years ago, the small Central American country even became the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. This venture ultimately failed, as the cryptocurrency was never used by the majority of Salvadorans and is no longer legal tender in the country.

But El Salvador does not intend to stop there in the technological arena. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has announced a partnership with the government to “launch the world’s first national AI-based education program.” According to the authorities, this personalized tutoring system will be based on artificial intelligence and will involve more than one million students in over 5,000 public schools.

A controversial chatbot

But El Salvador did not choose just any artificial intelligence. Close to Donald Trump, with whom he signed an extradition agreement allowing migrants arrested in the United States to be held in its prisons, President Nayib Bukele turned to AI developed by Elon Musk’s company, Musk himself having long been close to the White House tenant.

Or Grok, xAI’s chatbot, is much better known for its excesses than for its educational ambitions. Over the past year, it has notably distinguished itself by spreading anti-Semitic content, promoting conspiracy theories, evoking a “white genocide,” and making the unfounded claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

In a publication that is the subject of complaints filed by the League of Human Rights (LDH) and SOS Racisme, Grok even went so far as to claim that the gas chambers at the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus (…) rather than for mass executions,” a statement that amounts to Holocaust denial. A first? Not really.

While El Salvador is promoting a national AI-based education program, the United States is already experimenting with this type of teaching on a smaller scale. Artificial intelligence is used in particular in certain charter schools, which are publicly funded but autonomously managed institutions that enjoy considerable pedagogical freedom.

These schools, which serve nearly 4 million students across the country, are testing new educational models with a focus on results. Arizona, one of the states with the most charter schools, has established itself as a prime testing ground for these experiments, as exemplified by Unbound Academy, which has developed a curriculum largely based on artificial intelligence.

Estonia has also already taken the plunge, this time with OpenAI. In February, the company announced a partnership enabling secondary school students and teachers to benefit from a personalized ChatGPT. However, other experiments have shown their limitations: in rural Colombia, the use of Meta chatbots has been criticized by teachers, who blame this technology for some of the poor results and exam failures.

It remains to be seen whether this educational shift will suffer the same fate as El Salvador’s bitcoin plan. Despite its failure to gain widespread adoption among the population, the government continues to support the cryptocurrency, claiming to buy and hold reserves, while Nayib Bukele is betting on a future surge in prices, particularly thanks to Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The question now is: will Grok follow the same trajectory in Salvadoran schools?