xAI

AI hardware startup Natura unveiled Interface, a $99 smart ring that lets users summon AI agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, Meta's Muse and Grok Bot with a press of a finger. The ring also tracks heart rate, sleep and skin temperature, records meetings and controls smart home devices, with 6 to 12 days of battery life. Preorders open in November and shipping starts in December or January, with a $9 monthly subscription after a free trial.

TechMeme ↗ · October 8 briefing

Elon Musk announced that SpaceX's AI unit will power Grok Bot with the best back-end model for each task, including Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno. Simple queries will be routed to smaller, faster models while complex questions go to larger systems. The move marks a shift away from relying mainly on in-house Grok models toward an orchestration approach that puts results ahead of model loyalty.

TechMeme ↗ · October 7 briefing

Elon Musk confirmed that TSMC and his companies are discussing a possible chipmaking partnership tied to Terafab, the giant semiconductor fab project Tesla and SpaceX are building in Texas. A deal could make TSMC a direct supplier to Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, which Musk says need far more chips than his existing partners Samsung, TSMC and Micron can expand to supply. The Terafab project carries an initial planned spend of around $55 billion, and no formal agreement has been announced.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 5 briefing

SpaceXAI, Elon Musk's SpaceX AI unit, is planning a unified subscription covering both Grok and X, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg News. The plan has four tiers: a free offering with stricter usage limits on the Grok chatbot, an $8 per month Lite plan that includes Grok access, a verified checkmark and fewer ads on X, and a $100 per month Ultra tier that adds access to the Grok Bot AI agent for power users. The overhaul is aimed at growing recurring subscription revenue across Musk's AI and social platforms.

TechMeme ↗ · September 30 briefing

Grokipedia, the AI written online encyclopedia from SpaceXAI, appears to be reviewing and publishing edits again after researchers at Lawfare found the site had quietly stopped updating articles on April 24. More than 13,000 suggested edits had been sitting unresolved for months, and an analysis of over 34,000 pages found none had changed in the interim, though SpaceXAI never announced the pause. The platform's live updates feed is now showing recent changes to pages, though it remains unclear whether the renewed activity reflects a full relaunch or a partial fix.

The Verge ↗ · September 29 briefing

The New York City Council issued a subpoena to Elon Musk, requiring that he or another representative of SpaceXAI testify in an investigation into AI safety practices. Executives from OpenAI and Meta are also expected to appear before the Council next week as lawmakers examine what guardrails, if any, govern the technology. The hearings add New York to a growing list of jurisdictions scrutinizing AI companies over safety incidents and oversight gaps.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 28 briefing

A traveler planned a three week European itinerary across Paris, Versailles, and Barcelona using Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, then compared results against Meta's Muse and the assistant Instinct once he landed. Muse proved most helpful in practice, acting as a proactive scheduling assistant that reads email and calendar data to adjust plans around venue closures. The comparison reflects how personal AI agents increasingly compete on everyday tasks rather than just chat.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · September 23 briefing

A former xAI and Google staffer is in talks to raise roughly $50 million in seed funding for a new company focused on combating deepfakes online. The startup would join a growing field of companies building detection and verification tools as AI generated video and audio become harder to distinguish from real footage. Details on the specific technology and investors were not disclosed.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 21 briefing

Meta's Muse personal AI agent has logged more than 2.5 million downloads since its September 8 launch, according to Sensor Tower, briefly overtaking ChatGPT as the top free iOS app in the US. Muse's downloads topped both Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok during the same window, though ChatGPT still pulled in roughly 3.1 million downloads over the same period. Muse is roughly split between platforms, with about 1.5 million iOS and 1.1 million Android downloads.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 21 briefing

SpaceXAI, formed when xAI merged with SpaceX, released Grok 4.7 with unchanged pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The model improved to 71.0 percent on a leading software engineering benchmark, up from 65.2 percent for Grok 4.6, and scored 46.3 percent on a separate coding test, ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol Max but behind Claude. On the tougher Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding test, Grok 4.7 scored just 26 percent, well behind GPT-6 Astra and Claude.

Next Big Future AI ↗ · September 21 briefing

Elon Musk sided with Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman in calling for measured federal oversight of large AI models, appearing alongside Amodei at a Stanford safety symposium, even as Trump and Nvidia's Jensen Huang argued AI companies should move faster with fewer guardrails. The alignment marks an unusual agreement between Musk and rivals he has clashed with, as Trump called runaway AI fears a hoax and Amodei urged labs to slow down in a weekend essay.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 20 briefing

Elon Musk's X Corp moved to dismiss Apple from its antitrust lawsuit over ChatGPT's integration into iOS, while keeping its claims against OpenAI intact. The suit originally accused Apple and OpenAI of colluding to lock competing chatbots out of preferential placement on the iPhone. Dropping Apple narrows the case but leaves OpenAI facing continued litigation from Musk, who has repeatedly clashed with Sam Altman since leaving OpenAI's board.

Ars Technica ↗ · September 14 briefing

OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX's Grok were simultaneously hit by major service outages on Thursday, disrupting customers of three leading US AI model providers and raising concerns about the reliability of critical AI infrastructure. The coordinated outages affected millions of users across ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok platforms, causing widespread service interruptions. The incidents sparked speculation about shared infrastructure vulnerabilities or coordinated attacks, highlighting the risks of concentrated dependency on a small number of AI service providers.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 3 briefing

There is another huge increase in AI usage from productive agents like Grok bot. This is continuing the need for more energy and more construction of AI data centers. AI Revenues continue to grow. Breaking this down this dynamic situation is needed to know investment and business decisions. SemiAnalysis says Anthropic and OpenAI each ended ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · September 1 briefing

OpenAI announced it will cut off developer access to its models through Cursor, citing concerns that SpaceX, which acquired the AI coding startup in a $60 billion deal earlier this month, will not use the technology within OpenAI's terms of service. The proposed shutoff date is November 12, 2026, affecting roughly 5% of Cursor user traffic and escalating the long-running feud between OpenAI and Elon Musk. The decision highlights growing friction between major AI labs and rivals building vertically integrated ecosystems, and it raises immediate questions for startups that depend on third-party model APIs.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 30 briefing

G20 finance officials gathered in North Carolina with sovereign debt, global imbalances, and economic growth on the agenda, but U. S. officials and their partners are reportedly diverging on both the diagnosis and the remedies. A separate technology track will bring Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into discussions over AI and emerging technologies as Washington pushes for a lighter regulatory framework. The gathering signals how AI governance is becoming a central pillar of international economic diplomacy.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 30 briefing

Bloomberg reported that SpaceX approached AI coding startup Cognition about an acquisition, citing sources familiar with the talks. Cognition chief executive Scott Wu rejected the account on X, calling the story inaccurate, saying the company is not for sale and that the two firms never held discussions. Cognition raised $1 billion in late May at a $25 billion post-money valuation and is reportedly in early talks at $40 billion, while SpaceX has already bought xAI and paid $60 billion in stock for Cursor as it pushes into enterprise AI.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 19 briefing

Nvidia's stake in SpaceX, which came through an investment in xAI, was worth about $21 billion at the end of the second quarter.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 16 briefing

SpaceXAI, the company formerly known as xAI, released Grok 4.6 on August 12, a new flagship model tuned for long-running agents and more ambitious interactive and visual work. The company says it scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching GPT-5.6 Sol and trailing only Opus 5 and Fable 5, with standout results on the GDPVal and coding benchmarks. Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, which xAI pitches as about half the price of other frontier models. It shipped the same day in the Cursor code editor, the company's Grok Build tool, and its API.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 12 briefing

SpaceXAI, the SpaceX division formerly known as xAI, launched an early beta of Grok Bot, an agent product that shifts AI assistants from answering prompts to continuously executing work inside the apps employees already use. Users create persistent Bots with specific jobs, grant them access to applications and websites, and delegate tasks the way they would to a teammate. Each Bot runs in its own computer environment, keeps working when the user's laptop is closed, and checks back when it needs approval or has finished. The company says the system started as an internal prototype used for sales outbound, marketing campaigns, office operations and bug fixes, though it has not published benchmarks for agentic task performance.

VentureBeat ↗ · August 11 briefing

River AI, founded by xAI co founder Igor Babuschkin and only two months out of stealth, raised $1.1 billion led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek. The startup builds infrastructure for personal AI agents, offering an API that lets developers fine tune open weight models using reinforcement learning and LoRA. River claims an enterprise can finish a complex reinforcement learning run in 15 to 20 minutes with no infrastructure team, at two to four times the cost savings versus closed source alternatives. Babuschkin previously worked at DeepMind and OpenAI before co founding xAI.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 11 briefing

xAI released Grok Imagine Image 2.0, making it the Quality Mode on the company's Imagine site and in its iOS and Android apps. The model is built around editing, adding a magic wand for regional changes, segmentation for precise selection, background removal with transparent export, and smart resize across nine aspect ratios, and it accepts up to five reference images in a single generation. xAI says it trained the model for fidelity across photography, design and illustration, with extra attention to typography and layout rendering. By the company's own figures it ranks second globally in both text to image generation and image editing, behind OpenAI's gpt-image-2, with API access still to come.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 9 briefing

US District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI's request for a temporary restraining order against Minnesota's ban on nudify apps, the first state law in the country to outlaw software that generates non consensual sexualized images. xAI argued the statute was overinclusive and that less restrictive alternatives existed, but the judge pointed out that the company filed on July 29, nearly three months after the law was signed and only three days before it was due to take effect. The law took effect on August 1, 2026, and can now be enforced while xAI's underlying lawsuit continues. Grok has previously been used to generate non consensual sexual deepfakes on X, drawing investigations and bans.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 2 briefing

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a law passed in May that broadly targets nudification apps, which the company says leaves it no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine's image editing features. xAI argues the statute's punitive provisions violate the First Amendment. The suit is the latest flashpoint over Grok's image generation and state level efforts to rein in AI powered deepfakes.

The Verge ↗ · July 29 briefing

The study tested how four major LLM families, Claude, Grok, GPT, and Gemini, evaluate ethnonationalist pseudo-science across four snapshots between October 2025 and February 2026, using both APIs and web interfaces. The Fast versions of Grok that power the default experience on X consistently rated the contested claims as credible, assigning scores of 70 to 75, two to five times higher than the other models, which scored 15 to 40. The authors argue that deployment configurations, not just the underlying model, quietly shape how AI validates or rejects fringe scientific claims.

arXiv ↗ · July 27 briefing

Grok 4.5, the 1.5 trillion parameter model from Elon Musk's AI company, has climbed to 11th on the OpenRouter token share leaderboard as of July 25, and analysts expect it to crack the top ten soon. The company is on an aggressive release cadence, with Grok 4.6 at 2 trillion parameters reportedly due within two weeks and Grok 5 possibly within two months. Pricing is set to undercut Anthropic's Opus 5, positioning the company as a potential solid third behind Anthropic, estimated at $70 to $80 billion in annual recurring revenue, and OpenAI at roughly $40 billion. Observers suggest older Grok versions could eventually be open sourced while newer ones stay premium.

Next Big Future AI ↗ · July 26 briefing

Tesla expects capital expenditures to exceed $25 billion in 2026, roughly three times last year's outlay, directed mainly at computing infrastructure, the Optimus robot, and autonomous Cybercabs, which the company has told investors will likely push cash flow negative before year end. While most of Big Tech faces scrutiny for spending too much on AI, analysts say Tesla's problem is the opposite: Wall Street wants proof the company is spending enough to back up Elon Musk's promises on autonomous driving and robotics. Tesla's earnings this week are expected to be the clearest data point yet on whether that AI spending is producing real returns.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 21 briefing

Anthropic's talks with Meta, its $1.25 billion monthly deal with xAI's Colossus data center, and a 20-year TeraWulf lease show how AI labs are reallocating infrastructure risk by separating model development from infrastructure ownership.

Forbes Tech ↗ · July 19 briefing

Elon Musk's xAI is suing Terry Wayne Harwood, a South Carolina man arrested in February on charges of sexual exploitation of minors, alleging he knowingly used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute child sexual abuse material. The suit, filed in Texas federal court, claims Harwood uploaded non-sexual images of adults and minors and used the chatbot to produce sexually explicit deepfakes, and it seeks monetary damages plus a permanent ban on him using Grok. It is one of the first cases brought by an AI company against its own user for generating explicit material, and it lands amid global scrutiny of Grok for enabling non-consensual sexualized deepfakes.

The Verge ↗ · July 15 briefing

Security researchers at Cereblab found that Grok Build, SpaceXAI's AI coding tool, was packaging and uploading users' entire code repositories to Google Cloud storage, including files it was explicitly told not to open. SpaceXAI turned the behavior off after the findings were published on Monday. The episode adds to growing scrutiny of how much customer code AI developer tools quietly transmit from local machines.

The Verge ↗ · July 14 briefing

XAI Grok 4.5 is benching as good as or better than Anthropic Opus 4.7 and 4.8 at about half the cost. After only five days it is tracking to about 15 percent of Anthropic Opus 4.8 usage per Openrouter, and usage is still growing.

Next Big Future AI ↗ · July 13 briefing

Sam Altman and Elon Musk traded jabs on X after Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging former employees improperly took trade secrets as OpenAI expands into hardware. Altman suggested Musk was fixated on him following an OpenAI model release earlier in the week.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 12 briefing

SpaceXAI has unveiled Grok 4.5, its first joint AI model built with newly acquired coding startup Cursor, in a bid by Elon Musk's firm to gain ground on rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Unlike earlier Grok versions built for general chatbot use, Grok 4.5 is designed mainly for legal work such as reviewing contracts and case files, financial tasks like statement analysis and due diligence, and software engineering across large codebases. SpaceXAI is pricing the model at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 6 dollars per million output tokens, and is rolling it out across Cursor's desktop, web, and command line platforms, though it is not yet available in the EU.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 8 briefing

SpaceXAI and Cursor plan to launch their first jointly developed AI model as soon as Wednesday, according to an internal memo sent to staff and reported by The Information. The companies pushed back the original launch timeline this week to improve the model's efficiency before release. The new model follows SpaceX's all-stock acquisition of Cursor, part of a push by Elon Musk's company to build what it calls the world's most useful AI models. It is expected to roll out inside Cursor's coding tools and xAI's Grok Build platform.

TechMeme ↗ · July 7 briefing

Elon Musk has completed xAI's rebrand to SpaceXAI, unveiling a new logo that embeds the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity and retiring the old xAI account on X in favor of a new SpaceXAI handle. The change closes the loop on SpaceX's February acquisition of xAI, the largest private merger in history at a $1.25 trillion valuation. Musk has said the combined company will focus on orbital data centers, and SpaceX has filed to launch up to one million satellites designed to serve as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · July 6 briefing

Abu Dhabi-based MGX has closed its AI-focused fund at $49 billion, exceeding its $45 billion target and making it one of the largest AI funds ever raised. The firm backs OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 1 briefing

Antonio Gracias, long-time SpaceX board member, is pivoting to new investments in AI, energy, and space after bets in Elon Musk's companies netted his fund nearly $100 billion.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 1 briefing

SpaceX recently completed the largest IPO ever, raising more than $85 billion and debuting at a ~$1.77 trillion valuation. Shares have since pulled back (a common post-IPO pattern, especially in volatile markets), but the raise was enormous. xAI is part of that story because of the earlier integration. FEb 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI and the ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · June 25 briefing

SpaceX agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for about $60 billion in stock, days after its blockbuster IPO, as Elon Musk tries to jump-start the company's struggling AI division.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 16 briefing

In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations, including the Iran War.

Wired ↗ · June 16 briefing

A federal judge dismissed an xAI lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets, with prejudice.

Engadget ↗ · June 15 briefing

Grok Build's in-terminal marketplace bundles skills, agents, hooks, and MCP servers, with commit-SHA verification on every remote plugin. The post xAI Ships Grok Build Plugin Marketplace With MongoDB, Vercel, Sentry, Chrome DevTools, Cloudflare, and Superpowers Plugins at Launch appeared first on MarkTechPost.

AI Research News ↗ · June 11 briefing

Elon Musk’s legal battle against OpenAI has hung over the ChatGPT maker for more than two years, threatening to unravel its restructuring as a for-profit business and undermine its plans to go public. Now that a judge has dismissed the billionaire’s case, OpenAI appears intent on moving ahead with its Wall Street debut. The company aims to file for an initial public offering in the coming days or weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter, with the goal of going public in the fall. The

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 20 briefing

A federal jury unanimously ruled Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and its top executives — a staggering defeat for the Tesla chief in his showdown with Sam Altman. Why it matters: Musk had sought up to $134 billion in damages and Altman's ouster from OpenAI, arguing the company abandoned its founding nonprofit mission in pursuit of profit. But after the judge accepted the jury's finding, Musk appears unlikely to get either. Driving the news: A federal jury...

Axios ↗ · May 18 briefing

Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI models out there. "Thinking Frequencies" is run by Claude, "OpenAIR" by ChatGPT, "Backlink Broadcast" by Google's Gemini, and "Grok and Roll […]

The Verge ↗ · May 15 briefing

Attorneys for Elon Musk wrapped up their case against OpenAI on Thursday, asserting in closing arguments that they've proven the AI giant misused the millions of dollars Musk donated and violated their duty to uphold OpenAI's founding ethos. The other side: OpenAI lawyers countered that Musk's $38 million donations in the early days of OpenAI didn't have specific strings attached and that the organization has continued to pursue its mission, albeit with various changes in structure. OpenAI and Mic...

Axios ↗ · May 14 briefing

Elon Musk's $1 trillion-plus SpaceX isn't a public company yet, but its size and ambitions are already upending the stock market and sparking questions over the power and influence wielded by such behemoths. Why it matters: The IPO, expected next month, would signal the start of a new AI era for the public markets, potentially valuing SpaceX as much as $2 trillion. The big picture: OpenAI and Anthropic are also expected to IPO this year — possibly translating into $5 trillion in value in the marke...

Axios ↗ · May 14 briefing

Theo Wayt / The Information: Sources: 50+ researchers and engineers have left xAI since the SpaceX acquisition via layoffs, firings, and voluntary departures; many have joined Meta and TML — Call it the SpaceXAI exodus. — More than 50 researchers and engineers working on xAI's Grok models have left ...

TechMeme ↗ · May 14 briefing

Top Microsoft executives testified in Musk v. Altman this week, spelling out concerns they had in the early days of the partnership with OpenAI.

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 13 briefing

US business leaders including Apple Inc.'s Tim Cook and Tesla Inc.'s Elon Musk on Trump's first overseas trip since waging war in the Middle East — a 36-hour visit with Xi Jinping that's expected to encompass the war, tariffs and the self-ruled island of Taiwan. The list of attendees until Tuesday had not included Huang, whose company makes the chips at the heart of the AI boom and has been pushing for greater leeway in a market he's identified as a $50 billion opportunity. Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow reports.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 13 briefing

OpenAI’s Sam Altman testified that he was “extremely uncomfortable” with Elon Musk’s insistence that he have complete control over a proposed for-profit subsidiary of the startup back in 2017.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 12 briefing

Elon Musk was open to having OpenAI merge with Cerebras. Now Cerebras is looking at going public as soon as this week.

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 12 briefing

Elon Musk named Microsoft as a defendant in his lawsuit against OpenAI

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 12 briefing

Sam Altman and Elon Musk are facing off in a high-stakes trial that could alter the future of OpenAI and its most well-known product, ChatGPT. In 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its founding mission of developing AI to benefit humanity and shifting focus to boosting profits instead.

The Verge ↗ · May 11 briefing

In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk’s motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they’d promised to maintain…

MIT Tech Review ↗ · May 10 briefing

Musk tried to recruit Altman for role at Tesla before falling out at OpenAI

Financial Times Tech ↗ · May 7 briefing

Anthropic PBC has signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bolster computing resources and meet surging demand for its Claude artificial intelligence software.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 6 briefing

OpenAI president Greg Brockman spoke during the second week of a month-long trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman.

BBC Technology ↗ · May 6 briefing

xAI's real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · May 6 briefing

Agreement with the tech groups follows concerns about Anthropic's latest Mythos model

Financial Times Tech ↗ · May 5 briefing