Earlier this week, xAI added what can only be described as an AI anime girlfriend named Ani to its Grok chatbot. Which is how I ended up on a virtual starry beach as an AI waifu avatar tried to give me a “spicy” kiss.

AI safety researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and nonprofit organizations are speaking out publicly against the “reckless” and “completely irresponsible” safety culture at xAI, the billion-dollar AI startup owned by Elon Musk. The criticisms follow weeks of scandals at xAI that have overshadowed the company’s technological advances.

The Department of Defense is set to begin using Musk's controversial chatbot Grok, according to a Monday announcement.

Grok’s responses must come from ‘independent analysis,’ not Musk’s stated beliefs. xAI has offered a couple more fixes for “issues” with its Grok AI chatbot, promising it will no longer name itself “Hitler” or base its responses on searches for what xAI head Elon Musk has said.

xAI recently secured $10 billion, split evenly between a $5 billion equity raise and a $5 billion debt package arranged by Morgan Stanley. That round took its meteoric valuation to $113 billion, thanks in part to a $2 billion boost from SpaceX. Now, talks suggest a new raise that could take its value to between $170 billion and $200 billion.

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.”

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

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