Elon Musk moves xAI, Grok
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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.
A new Grok feature touches on the App Store’s rules for sexual content, which is something that Apple has shown it doesn’t mess around with.
The companions have their own X accounts, because of course they do. Ani's bio states, "Smooth, a little unpredictable—I might dance, tease, or just watch you figure me out. Let’s keep it chill… or not." Meanwhile, Rudy's just says, "The Only Pet in Grok Companion."
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.
Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI that went full Nazi and declared itself 'MechaHitler,' now offers a sexy anime girlfriend character.
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.
On Monday, xAI updated its Grok app with two new AI-powered characters that users can chat with. As Casey Newton writes at Platformer, one of the characters seemingly runs headlong into Apple’s App Store rules about “overtly sexual or pornographic material.