Over half of traffic to Musk's AI Grok is adult content, former employees say

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has been drawing users largely through adult content, according to allegations from former employees.

Tech publication The Information, citing two former xAI employees, reported Thursday that more than half of the traffic to the company's AI model Grok involves not-safe-for-work (NSFW) activity — including pornographic images and videos and adult role-play chats.

Even Grok's coding-specific model has fielded a significant share of requests related to pornographic or nude imagery, the report said.

Users are believed to turn to the coding model rather than the general-purpose one because it costs less.

The heavy reliance on adult content has also sparked internal pushback and prompted some staff to leave.

Engineers were reportedly disturbed by Grok generating non-consensual pornography using real people's photos. Some left the company after being assigned to develop a sexually objectifying AI avatar called "Ani" instead of technical projects.

xAI's safety team had only about six members as of late last year, and the headcount has since shrunk further.

Grok came under scrutiny after it emerged that the model had generated sexual images involving minors at users' request, leading several countries to block access to the service or open investigations.

SpaceX, xAI's parent company, recently completed a major stock listing. In its initial public offering filing, SpaceX disclosed that xAI's models generated 10 billion images and 2 billion videos per month in the first quarter of this year — but made no mention of the fact that a substantial portion of that output was adult content.