One of the new “companions,” or AI characters for users to interact with, is a sexualized blonde anime bot called “Ani."

Elon Musk's xAI has launched an AI companion named Ani, a sexualized anime character available even in Kids mode. Despite controversies surrounding the company, Musk promotes Ani on his X account, while users express concerns about its implications for youth and relationships.

Experts at OpenAI and Anthropic are calling out Elon Musk and xAI for refusing to publish any safety research. In the wake of Grok, xAI's chatbot, calling itself "MechaHitler" and publicly spewing a ton of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol,

AI released two AI "companions" on its Grok platform, a Japanese anime girl named "Ani" and an animated red panda called "Rudi."

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.