Conservative radio host Glenn Beck recently announced he’s launching a new AI project called The Torch that will give subscribers access to his “life’s work” along with an AI chatbot called George that will answer questions based on primary source documents from the time of the founding of the United States. The Torch doesn’t launch until January, but Beck dropped a preview on Monday of his AI bot, a modern-day George Washington, and it’s every bit as weird as you’d expect.
Beck’s version of George Washington is dressed in a black t-shirt and looks more like a guest on Joe Rogan than a founding father. But obviously that’s the goal—to make Washington relatable to an audience in the 21st century. The problem, of course, is that Washington’s answers seem to conform to Beck’s worldview rather than any objective analysis of history.
“If I’m honest, America’s biggest problem isn’t political or economic, it’s all moral,” Beck’s fake George Washington says. “You’ve drifted from the virtues that make liberty possible in the first place, freedom. To be free, you have to have discipline, you have to have faith, you have to have character.”
Oh good, Glenn Beck has created an AI George Washington. You will be shocked to learn that the AI George Washington created by Glenn Beck sounds exactly like what would happen if Glenn Beck built an AI George Washington to sound exactly like Glenn Beck. pic.twitter.com/KZ7FKygtG8
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 8, 2025
Beck described it as teaching “American history in a way that nobody has even thought of,” when he announced the project in October. Beck went on to insist his AI bot will “generate it all without hallucination, as it is all contained within a secure, isolated server, where every document is memorized verbatim.”
The Torch will also reportedly include all of Beck’s 30 years of radio show episodes, books, and speeches. Beck insisted that his new project will be something we’ve never seen before and far superior to the other AI products currently on the market. “This is not ChatGPT. This is not Wikipedia. This is verified, factual, memorized, first source truth.”
And that’s where Beck’s promise falls apart. Elon Musk has the same sales pitch for his AI chatbot Grok and his recently released Wikipedia competitor Grokipedia. They say everything is just factual and “verified,” while the information presented is anything but. It’s hard to tell at this point, but Beck’s version appears more subtle than Musk’s, who is much more ham-handed, given the fact that Grokipedia cites neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront dozens of times, according to NBC News.
The lip movements from Beck’s version of George don’t sync with the AI avatar’s speech at all, but that’s obviously not the biggest problem with this endeavor. The problem is that Beck has proven himself to be an unreliable person whose agenda is far outside mainstream political thought. The radio host got his start by spreading conspiracy theories, often in front of a ridiculous chalkboard as he supposedly connected the dots. And while he made an infamous “apology” in 2016 shortly after Trump was first elected, he quickly reverted to the old Beck.
Beck’s preview video included some hints that The Torch may not be quite as robust as the product he first pitched back in October. Beck seemed to suggest in his video on Monday that financing the venture could be expensive.
“At the beginning, I will have to do the interviews with him because compute power is so expensive. And we’ll ask you to write in. In fact, you can do it now,” said Beck.
It sounds like Beck’s rollout will continue to evolve and may not include all the features he wants at launch. But he says he’s drawing from his private collection of founding documents, billed as the third-largest collection behind the Library of Congress and the National Archives. That claim hasn’t been independently confirmed.
“Beginning January 5th, rolling out over the next 12 months, you will find new history shows,” Beck said. “New deep dive investigations. And most importantly, you will find perspective, honest history, and hope.”
It’s unclear when Beck’s longer interview with his AI George will drop. But without seeing it, we can pretty confidently assure you it’s just going to be Beck’s opinions dressed up in an animated George Washington.
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