Elon Musk is integrating AI across his companies and blurring the lines between them.

Elon Musk has just unveiled “Companions,” a new feature for his AI chatbot, Grok, that allows users to interact with AI personas. These include Ani, a gothic anime girl who communicates with emojis, flirtatious messages, and facts, as well as Rudy, a friendly red panda.

Musk's Grok AI just dropped a new Companion modes, featuring a flirty anime chatbot called Ani, and it has got the internet buzzing.

At launch, Grok AI’s Companions will be available to SuperGrok subscribers ($30 per month), who need to enable the feature from the app's settings. This is just a “soft launch,” and enabling the feature will get much easier in a few days, said xAI owner Elon Musk on Monday.

This marks a shift in the AI wars. Instead of just competing on intelligence or reasoning, Musk wants Grok to feel more personal, more addictive, and more human, or at least more fun. But the reactions online show that people are split. SuperGrok now has two new companions for you, say hello to Ani and Rudy! pic.twitter.com/SRrV6T0MGT

AI explained why Grok 4 seemed to search for Elon Musk's opinions when asked about some hot-button topics.

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.

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.”

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.