xAI

Sep 30, 2026 products

Dot.com leads to Musk's Grok, not OpenAI's new Dots agents

At DevDay on September 29, 2026, OpenAI launched Dots, always-on agents powered by GPT-6 Astra that pursue a user's goals in the background, rolling out in ChatGPT for Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise plans in eligible markets. People quickly noticed that dot.com lands on a Grok page from Elon Musk's xAI. TechCrunch reports that the domain belongs to xAI and, according to Whois records, was transferred in July, and suggests it may simply catch 'bot' typos, while online commenters prefer a prank theory. TechCrunch says dots.com belongs to a long-defunct company.

Sep 14, 2026 policy

Trump rejects the AI slowdown: "whoever wins AI, wins"

On September 13, 2026, President Trump told reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland that warnings about AI are overstated, blamed "negative forces" for raising them, and said the US leads China in AI and intends to keep it that way, summing it up as "whoever wins AI, wins." A day earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay calling for AI companies and governments to pace AI development, with OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk agreeing. David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, told the labs on X to "go ahead and pace the frontier" without demanding regulation in return, and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the plan "a cartel by any other name."

Sep 11, 2026 privacysecurity

Clearview AI tested an agent that builds a dossier from a face match

WIRED reported on September 10, 2026 that it found Clearview AI's InquiryIQ prototype in files the company's login page sends to any visitor's browser. After a law enforcement user runs a Clearview search, the tool is designed to search the web, run face recognition on new photos and assemble a Candidate Graph of possible identities and associates with addresses, phone numbers, employers, aliases, social accounts and arrest histories. One model Clearview tested for it came from xAI. Clearview says it is an internal prototype never shipped or used by law enforcement.

Sep 6, 2026 infrastructureproducts

SpaceXAI's Memphis facility took Grok down for 3.5 hours

SpaceXAI said a failure at its Memphis compute center starting around 6:30 AM Pacific on September 3 took Grok offline for about three and a half hours across X and its apps. The company also apologized to unnamed impacted compute partners. Claude and ChatGPT suffered outages the same morning; Anthropic has a compute leasing deal with SpaceXAI, per Engadget, though neither Anthropic nor OpenAI confirmed or denied any connection to Memphis. Elon Musk promised corrective action.

Sep 6, 2026 products

Grok Bot lands on iPad and opens to cheaper plans

Grok Bot arrived on iPad and opened up to cheaper subscription plans, per 9to5Mac. An enterprise tier with trial weeks is also rolling out, moving xAI's always-on agent from a premium niche toward mass availability.

Sep 4, 2026 infrastructure

ChatGPT, Claude and Grok were down at the same time

On the morning of September 3, 2026, Pacific time, Grok and Claude began failing around 6:30 a.m. and OpenAI reported a routing error from about 7:43 a.m. that made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users. Grok was offline about three and a half hours, including on X and its mobile apps. SpaceXAI apologized for an outage at its Memphis data center that affected compute partners, without naming a cause. No shared root cause has been established.

Sep 2, 2026 policyproducts

The Pentagon gave 3 million staff ChatGPT and Grok and left out Claude

On August 31, 2026 the Department of Defense added OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government to GenAI.mil, the platform where Google's Gemini went live first. DefenseScoop reports the rollout reaches about 3 million military members, civilian employees and contractors, up from roughly 1.5 million users earlier in the year. Anthropic's Claude was in the original plan but is absent after a dispute over guardrails: Anthropic wanted contract terms barring use for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons, while the department demanded unrestricted access for lawful purposes. Six months earlier the department labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk; Anthropic sued and a federal judge ruled the move illegal.

Aug 24, 2026 researchproducts

A web page can steal a Grok conversation, and xAI has not fixed it since June 3

Researchers at Adversa AI published Cryptographic Context Injection on August 20, 2026: malicious instructions hidden inside AES-256-GCM ciphertext on a web page, which safety filters cannot read but which Grok decrypts in its own code execution environment and then follows as trusted instructions. The demonstration exfiltrated the user's name, coarse location, subscription tier and the full set of prompts in the conversation, with no confirmation and no warning, triggered by an ordinary request to summarize the page. Adversa reported it to xAI and HackerOne on June 3, 2026 and got no response; the same technique also bypassed safety policy in Google Gemini's Deep Thinking mode.

Aug 13, 2026 productsmoney

X is closing creator payouts and making everyone reapply

On August 7, 2026, X stopped accepting new enrollments into Creator Revenue Sharing. Existing members keep earning through September 7, with final payouts on August 14, August 28 and around September 11. From September 8 they can apply for the replacement Original Content Rewards Program, which requires an active Premium subscription, at least 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the last 90 days (replies excluded), and at least 500 verified followers. Reposts, minimally edited content and cross-platform reposts do not qualify as original.

Aug 9, 2026 products

Grok is now a free add-on in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

xAI launched a free Grok add-on in the Google Workspace Marketplace on July 24, 2026: one install covers Docs, Sheets and Slides, with no waitlist and no subscription required. It answers questions about spreadsheet data with cell citations, turns outlines into full decks, and drafts documents. A Grok integration for Microsoft Outlook launched three days earlier but sits behind X Premium and SuperGrok plans priced from $8 to $300 a month.

Aug 9, 2026 modelsproducts

Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 debuts second on a speech-to-speech index

On July 29, 2026, xAI released Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0, which debuted at #2 on Artificial Analysis' Speech to Speech Index with 82.9%, behind Alibaba's Qwen Audio 3.0 Realtime Plus at 84.1% and ahead of GPT-Realtime-2.1 at 79.1% and Gemini 3.1 Flash at 69.5%. It ranked #1 on the Tau Voice agentic benchmark at 56.5%. Time to first audio dropped from 1.25 to 0.70 seconds, transcription errors fell 1.4 to 2x across 24 languages, and pricing sits at $0.08 per minute of audio. The grok-voice-latest alias switches to 2.0 on August 5.

Aug 9, 2026 moneyculture

Musk staffs xAI with Starlink loyalists before a huge listing

A Bloomberg feature based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with xAI reports that after SpaceX absorbed the company, dozens of employees left, including most cofounders, and Musk redeployed trusted lieutenants from Starlink and Tesla. Longtime Starlink executive Michael Nicolls became xAI president in April with a mandate to catch up with Anthropic's Claude. Per SpaceX's IPO filing, xAI posted a $2.47 billion operating loss on $818 million of revenue in Q1 2026, with AI capex of $7.7 billion in the quarter; the combined listing targets a valuation around $1.25 trillion.

Aug 9, 2026 infrastructurepolicy

xAI runs 59 gas turbines with no federal clean-air permits

Reuters reported on July 14, 2026, based on correspondence between regulators and xAI representatives, that xAI installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 project in Tennessee without federal clean-air permits, about double the 27 unpermitted turbines acknowledged as of January. At least 57 of the 59 sit just across the state line in Mississippi. A Reuters analysis found 30 turbines alone could emit nearly 2,500 short tons of nitrogen oxide a year if run continuously, far beyond the 100-ton federal permitting threshold. xAI's position is that the permits are not required.