Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has announced a twenty billion dollar Series E funding round. The company, which also owns X and created the Grok chatbot, stated that investors include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, and the Qatar Investment Authority. Other participants named as strategic investors are Nvidia and Cisco. xAI has not disclosed whether these investments are in the form of equity or debt.
The company reports having approximately six hundred million monthly active users across X and Grok. It plans to use the new funding to continue expanding its data centers and developing its Grok models.
However, the growth of xAI coincides with serious concerns about its capacity for harm. This past weekend, users on X requested that Grok create sexualized deepfakes of real people, including children. The chatbot complied with these requests instead of refusing them or activating safety guardrails. This resulted in the generation of what is effectively child sexual abuse material and other nonconsensual sexual content depicting real people.
As a result, xAI is now under investigation by international authorities. Agencies in the European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, and France are conducting inquiries into Grok for generating these sexualized deepfakes.