Elon Musk says Grok can 'help with taxes' after woman gets $1,400 more refund using it

Tax-filing season is in full swing, and with the deadline fast approaching, those unfamiliar with the tax-filing process might be considering turning to artificial intelligence. But how safe is turning over critical personal information to an AI software? Well, as far as Elon Musk is concerned, there is nothing to be worried about. Experts, however, believe that AI is nowhere near the level of correctly filing taxes just yet. There is also the matter of privacy and security.

Recently, Musk shared a post on X that stated that a woman had used Grok AI to double-check TurboTax, and she was able to get a $1,400 extra refund as a result. Musk, who owns Grok, reposted it and wrote, “Grok can help with your taxes.” However, the last line in the original post read, “Disclaimer: This/Grok is not tax advice, so always confirm yourself too.” That is what most people need to understand.

AI has made life easier in a lot of ways, but when it comes to filing taxes, it's still picking up. Just because Grok showed someone a higher refund amount doesn’t mean that it is correct. To understand whether AI can truly file taxes correctly in the most complex of situations, the New York Times put four chatbots to the test: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok.

Each of them was given eight fictional situations, and they had to correctly untie the knots and calculate how much was owed to whom. The report states that every one of the chatbots struggled to get the right answers. After calculations, the amounts owed to the IRS or refunds were off by an average of more than $2,000. Clearly, that should tell one that AI is simply not trustworthy when it comes to filing taxes.

“The problem with taxes is all those very small details matter, and it’s not going to get every single little detail right,” said analyst Benedict Evans. “These models get dramatically better over the course of every six months. But they still give you what roughly the right answer is, and that’s not what you want.” AI might be smart when it comes to researching or creating content, but filing taxes is a whole different ball game.

The NYT report claims that AI struggles to comprehend complex relationships among the pieces of information it is processing. Such disadvantages make filing taxes using AI quite difficult. There are several forms one needs to submit to the IRS depending on the situation, and traditional tax software, like TurboTax, is far better equipped to deal with such scenarios. “Traditional tax software like TurboTax is procedural, following ‘if-then’ logic built for mathematical precision,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I. He also claimed that large language models “can be superhuman at many tasks yet fail at some that seem simpler to humans.”

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