On Wednesday, Elon Musk discussed a new male AI “companion” that his company xAI is developing, which will run on the company’s unhinged chatbot software Grok. And while it’s not yet clear when this new robot buddy will be released, it sounds an awful lot like Musk is trying to make a romanticized version of himself.

The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

Days after a neo-Nazi scandal rocked Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, the billionaire's company xAI has rolled out another surreal

The Department of Defense is set to begin using Musk's controversial chatbot Grok, according to a Monday announcement.

This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms,” the Anti-Defamation League cautioned on X, in reaction to Grok’s latest pro-Hitler and antisemitic tirades.

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.