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

Ani, an anime avatar wearing a tight black dress, was launched the same day the tech billionaire was awarded a $200 million Department of Defense contract.

Elon Musk has just unveiled “Companions,” a new feature for his AI chatbot, Grok, that allows users to interact with AI personas. These include Ani, a gothic anime girl who communicates with emojis, flirtatious messages, and facts, as well as Rudy, a friendly red panda.

At launch, Grok AI’s Companions will be available to SuperGrok subscribers ($30 per month), who need to enable the feature from the app's settings. This is just a “soft launch,” and enabling the feature will get much easier in a few days, said xAI owner Elon Musk on Monday.

An AI model launched last week appears to have shipped with an unexpected occasional behavior: checking what its owner thinks first.

This is the smartest AI in the world,” Musk said. He did not mention the chatbot’s viral posts praising Hitler and calling itself “MechaHitler.”

Grok, the chatbot built by Musk’s start-up xAI, is integrated into X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Elon Musk released the newest artificial intelligence model from his company xAI on Wednesday night. In an hour-long public reveal session, he called the model, Grok 4, “the smartest AI in the world” and claimed it was capable of getting perfect SAT scores and near-perfect GRE results in every subject,