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.

Though no official name for Grok's new Fifty Shades -inspired AI character has yet been announced, Musk responded positively to proposals such as Nyx, Taki, and Andrej. Andrej appears to be a reference to Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder and Tesla's former senior director of AI.

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

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

Elon Musk's Grok AI has recently introduced AI companions to the app. Along with Ani and Rudy, Musk introduced the latest companion, Valentine. But there is more.

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

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.