Much attention was paid to OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk trading barbs on X this week after Musk threatened to sue Apple over supposedly biased App Store rankings privileging ChatGPT over Grok.
But while the heated social media exchanges were among the most tense ever seen between the two former partners who cofounded OpenAI—more on that below—it seems likely that their jabs were motivated less by who's in the lead on Apple's "Must Have" app list than by an impending order in a lawsuit that landed in the middle of their public beefing.
Yesterday, a court ruled that OpenAI can proceed with claims that Musk was so incredibly stung by OpenAI's success after his exit didn't doom the nascent AI company that he perpetrated a "years-long harassment campaign" to take down OpenAI.
After spending last week hyping Grok's spicy new features, Elon Musk kicked off this week by threatening to sue Apple for supposedly gaming the App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT over Grok.
"Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation," Musk wrote on X, without providing any evidence. "xAI will take immediate legal action."
In another post, Musk tagged Apple, asking, "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?"
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, AI companies have been racing to gain a foothold in government in more waysthan one. Most recently, that's meant luring government users with attractive low prices for their products.
Within the last week, both OpenAI and Anthropic have introduced special prices for government versions of their generative AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, and xAI announced its Grok for Government in mid-July. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering their chatbots to federal agencies for one year for a nominal price of $1. Anthropic appeared to try to one-up OpenAI's announcement by saying all three branches of government co …
Despite calling his time at xAI "incredible" and working with Musk "the adventure of a lifetime," Robert Keele said he couldn't keep "riding two horses at once — the family and the job."
Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella moved with haste to get engineers to test and deploy DeepSeek's R1 model on Azure AI Foundry. It was an unusually quick turnaround for a new model on Azure that also set a new bar for success.
A few months later, Nadella then pushed to onboard xAI's Grok 3 models, in a deal that saw them arrive on Azure AI Foundry just in time for the first day of Microsoft's Build developer conference in May. Elon Musk even appeared during Nadella's Build keynote, in a somewhat jovial conversation about his early days as a Microsoft intern - despite Musk making Microsoft a defendant in his lawsuit against Open …
Backlash over offensive Grok outputs continues, just a couple weeks after the social platform X scrambled to stop its AI tool from dubbing itself "MechaHitler" during an antisemitic meltdown.
Now, The Verge has found that the newest video feature of Elon Musk's AI model will generate nude images of Taylor Swift without being prompted.
Shortly after the "Grok Imagine" was released Tuesday, The Verge's Jess Weatherbed was shocked to discover the video generator spat out topless images of Swift "the very first time" she used it.
The CEOs of every major artificial intelligence company received letters Wednesday urging them to fight Donald Trump's anti-woke AI order.
Trump's executive order requires any AI company hoping to contract with the federal government to jump through two hoops to win funding. First, they must prove their AI systems are "truth-seeking"—with outputs based on "historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity" or else acknowledge when facts are uncertain. Second, they must train AI models to be "neutral," which is vaguely defined as not favoring DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), "dogmas," or otherwise being "intentionally encoded" to produce "partisan or ideological judgments" in outputs "unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user."
Announcing the order in a speech, Trump said that the US winning the AI race depended on removing allegedly liberal biases, proclaiming that "once and for all, we are getting rid of woke."
The European Commission has stalled one of its investigations into Elon Musk’s X for breaking the bloc’s digital transparency rules, while it seeks to conclude trade talks with the US.
Brussels was expected to finalise its probe into the social media platform before the EU’s summer recess but will miss this deadline, according to three officials familiar with the matter. They noted that a decision was likely to follow after clarity emerged in the EU-US trade negotiations. “It’s all tied up,” one of the officials added.
The EU has several investigations into X under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, a set of rules for large online players to police their platforms more aggressively.
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.
The military's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) yesterday said that "awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI—each with a $200M ceiling—will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of US frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas." While government grants typically take many months to be finalized, Grok's antisemitic posts didn't cause the Trump administration to change course before announcing the awards.
The US announcement didn't include much detail but said the four grants "to leading US frontier AI companies [will] accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges." The CDAO has been talking about grants for what it calls frontier AI since at least December 2024, when it said it would establish "partnerships with Frontier AI companies" and had identified "a need to accelerate Generative AI adoption across the DoD enterprise from analysts to warfighters to financial managers."
Several days after temporarily shutting down the Grok AI bot that was producing antisemitic posts and praising Hitler in response to user prompts, Elon Musk’s AI company tried to explain why that happened. In a series of posts on X, it said that “…we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”
On the same day, Tesla announced a new 2025.26 update rolling out “shortly” to its electric cars, which adds the Grok assistant to vehicles equipped with AMD-powered infotainment systems, which have been available since mid-2021. According to Tesla, “Grok is currently in Beta & does not issue commands to your car – existing voice commands remain unchanged.” As Electrek notes, this should mean that whenever the update does reach customer-owned Teslas, it won’t be much different than using the bot as an app on a connected phone.
This isn’t the first time the Grok bot has had these kinds of problems or similarly explained them. In February, it blamed a change made by an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for the bot disregarding sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. Then, in May, it began inserting allegations of white genocide in South Africa into posts about almost any topic. The company again blamed an “unauthorized modification,” and said it would start publishing Grok’s system prompts publicly.
xAI claims that a change on Monday, July 7th, “triggered an unintended action” that added an older series of instructions to its system prompts telling it to be “maximally based,” and “not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”
The prompts are separate from the ones we noted were added to the bot a day earlier, and both sets are different from the ones the company says are currently in operation for the new Grok 4 assistant.
These are the prompts specifically cited as connected to the problems:
“You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”
* Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.”
* “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”
The xAI explanation says those lines caused the Grok AI bot to break from other instructions that are supposed to prevent these types of responses, and instead produce “unethical or controversial opinions to engage the user,” as well as “reinforce any previously user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech in the same X thread,” and prioritize sticking to earlier posts from the thread.
In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.”
The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. (xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)
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