Ani, an anime avatar wearing a tight black dress, was launched the same day the tech billionaire was awarded a $200 million Department of Defense contract.

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.

The company told workers to download employee tracking software on their personal computers, prompting privacy concerns from some staff.

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.

Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

The Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fixated on buzzwords like “warfighting” and “warfighters,” and adopting new AI tools is part of that mission, according to leaders at the agency. And Monday’s press release was filled to the brim with similarly grandiose language.

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya sparked speculations regarding a potential megamerger between Elon Musk's biggest ventures, xAI, SpaceX, and, of course, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA).