On Wednesday, Elon Musk discussed a new male AI “companion” that his company xAI is developing, which will run on the company’s unhinged chatbot software Grok. And while it’s not yet clear when this new robot buddy will be released, it sounds an awful lot like Musk is trying to make a romanticized version of himself.

Ani is the collective fantasy of the kind of person who would earnestly seek out an amorous AI that Elon Musk made. She wears a short black dress with a tight corset around her waist and thigh-high fishnets, and she is designed to be obsessed with you.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

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

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.

Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms,” the Anti-Defamation League cautioned on X, in reaction to Grok’s latest pro-Hitler and antisemitic tirades.