Elon Musk led xAI has recently started offering a new AI companion ... Ani is being offered by xAI soon after the launch of company's latest Grok 4 AI model. The AI startup is no stranger to controversies as Grok went on full ‘mechahitler’ mode earlier ...

One of the new “companions,” or AI characters for users to interact with, is a sexualized blonde anime bot called “Ani."

xAI’s latest frontier model, Grok 4, has been released without industry-standard safety reports, despite the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, being notably vocal about his concerns regarding AI safety. Leading AI labs typically release safety reports known as “system cards” alongside frontier models.

Experts at OpenAI and Anthropic are calling out Elon Musk and xAI for refusing to publish any safety research. In the wake of Grok, xAI's chatbot, calling itself "MechaHitler" and publicly spewing a ton of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol,

The news comes alongside the U.S. Department of Defense’s announcement of $200 million contracts awarded to xAI, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI for AI implementation.

An AI model launched last week appears to have shipped with an unexpected occasional behavior: checking what its owner thinks first.

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.”

Elon Musk has named xAI's new AI companion "Ani," triggering a new meme coin frenzy around the latest update of Grok, Grok 4.