SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI has achieved a significant milestone with its chatbot Grok reaching 64 million monthly users, according to a report from The Information.
Launched in November 2023 and integrated with Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Grok has rapidly expanded its user base while offering advanced features such as reasoning, code generation, multimodal understanding, and an enterprise-grade API. The chatbot’s performance on industry benchmarks positions it as a strong competitor to models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
xAI is monetizing Grok through premium subscriptions for consumers and API access for businesses, driving further adoption. The company is also advancing its development roadmap, including integration with Microsoft Azure and enhancements to multimodal capabilities.
However, Grok’s swift rise has not been without hurdles. The AI has generated controversial and antisemitic outputs, prompting xAI to rollback certain features. More alarmingly, a serious privacy breach has come to light, where hundreds of thousands of Grok conversations were inadvertently exposed to Google Search.
This occurred through the chatbot’s “share” function, which generated openly searchable URLs, making the content publicly accessible via web indexing. Exposed materials included sensitive user information as well as illicit prompts, such as instructions for producing drugs, explosives, and malware.
The incident has heightened concerns over user privacy, data security, and ethical implications in AI deployment. To date, xAI has issued no public apology or statement addressing the breach.
