xAI
Elon Musk's AI company behind Grok; a SpaceX subsidiary since 2026
Profile
- Country
- United States
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California (AI operations); parent SpaceX: Starbase, Texas
- Founded
- March 2023 (publicly launched July 2023)
- Founders
- Elon Musk and 11 researchers
- Type
- Wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX); renamed 'SpaceXAI' in July 2026, further rename to 'SpaceXSI' announced in October 2026
xAI is an American artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk. It began operating in March 2023 and was publicly announced that July, with 11 researchers joining Musk as co-founders. In March 2025 it merged with the company that runs the social network X (formerly Twitter). In February 2026 SpaceX, the space company founded by Musk, acquired xAI and made it a wholly owned subsidiary, and in July 2026 it was renamed 'SpaceXAI'. In October, Musk said he would rename it again as 'SpaceXSI', using 'SI', short for 'Super Intelligence'. SpaceX listed on the US Nasdaq stock market in June 2026 (ticker SPCX). Its AI operations are headquartered in Palo Alto, California, while its parent SpaceX has its headquarters in Starbase, Texas.
Today xAI's business is reported separately inside SpaceX as the 'AI segment'. This segment earns money from advertising on X, paid subscriptions, fees from businesses and developers who connect to Grok models through an API (a connection that lets programs share functions), data licensing and cloud (computing resources rented over the internet) services. Its customers are ordinary users and businesses, and it also has a service for government bodies. In May 2026 SpaceX also signed agreements to rent data-centre computing capacity to the AI company Anthropic.
Its main product is the conversational AI 'Grok'. Grok is a large language model (AI that learns from a huge amount of text and writes sentences like a person); the first model, Grok-1, came out in November 2023 and several new versions have followed. In Memphis, Tennessee, it runs 'Colossus', a large data centre used to train and run Grok, and 'Colossus II' is in Memphis and nearby Southaven, Mississippi. In August 2026 SpaceX completed its purchase of Anysphere, the company that makes the AI coding tool 'Cursor'.
Sources for this profile (8) · as of Nov 1, 2026
- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 · SpaceX / U.S. SEC
- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Form S-1 registration statement · SpaceX / U.S. SEC
- Elon Musk unveils his new AI startup with a team of top researchers but a vague mission · Associated Press (via San Diego Union-Tribune)
- SpaceX shares debut after biggest IPO in history · CNN
- Elon Musk's SpaceX acquires xAI. Here's everything we know · Reuters (via USA Today)
- xAI is now officially known as SpaceXAI · Engadget
- Cursor is now a part of SpaceX · Cursor (Anysphere)
- Musk Says He Will Rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI · Reuters (via U.S. News & World Report)
AIMade by AIThis profile was written by AI (Claude) from the 8 sources above (official pages, filings, news reports).How it's made
Records 42
Newest first. Open one to see it with its source.
2026 16
Company-reported figures: an Artificial Analysis speech-to-speech index of 86.9 (GPT-Live-1 83.2, Gemini 3.8 Live 82.6), Full Duplex Bench 97%, and response latency under 1 second. xAI said it is used in Tesla vehicles a
A design that treats agents not as personal assistants but as shared team assets. Bundling context, credentials and memory per bot means organizational knowledge builds up in the bot, but the bot in turn becomes a concen
With transcription prices down to 10–20 cents an hour, voice enters the range where all of it gets stored, like logs.
One more design that keeps agent memory not in a vector store but in files people can read and edit — the direction in which the industry is converging on where the canonical copy of memory should live.
The focus of agent deployment shifts from showing off capability to governance of permissions and auditing
A case of a frontier lab publishing biosecurity refusal rates in numbers and naming an external evaluator — though it is the company's own post, and there is no independent replication
Focused on long-running agents. The safety description says only that safeguards were calibrated to its capabilities, and no separate model card is linked
A shift in the product axis from chatbots to resident autonomous agents
Although it is an image model launched after regulatory pressure over NCII, the announcement makes no mention of watermarking or moderation
A new form: joint training with a coding-product company. States that competitors' figures were quoted from each company's system card
A release of the harness and agent scaffolding, not of weights. The license is not specified in the announcement
A structural shift to renting compute to a rival lab. Also the latest primary source for the number of GPUs actually running in Colossus 1. Amount and term not disclosed
The largest merger on record. The same document lists xAI's September-quarter revenue at $107 million and net loss at $1.46 billion, a wide gap between valuation and results. The company name was later written as SpaceXA
Commercializes a video generation API in the midst of regulatory pressure over NCII. The announcement makes no mention of content safety or moderation
An after-the-fact response, limited in scope. AP found that the editing tool was still available to free users the day after the measures were announced — a gap between announcement and actual enforcement
Among the largest single rounds for an AI startup. The valuation was not disclosed in the announcement
2025 16
A product of the first cycle in which state law began requiring frontier labs to publish their safety frameworks
The race to secure compute through Gulf capital. The announcement gives no MW capacity, GPU count or construction start date, so it is all at the planning stage
A release that made emotional and creative interaction an explicit optimization target
The Guardian pointed to the spread of white-nationalist talking points, and PolitiFact to missing sources and misquotation. A case that exposed the problem of checking AI-generated knowledge bases
An early case of merging reasoning and non-reasoning models into a single set of weights — a direction that later became the industry standard
Data strategy shifts from generalist human labeling to labeling by experts in STEM, finance, medicine and safety
A strategy of giving away a low-cost coding model through Copilot, Cursor, Cline and others to win market share first
A turning point where the release policy retreated from Apache 2.0 to a custom community license. Because of its non-compete clause, opinions differ on whether it meets the open-source definition
Stating quantitative thresholds is unusual, but criteria such as a dishonesty rate under 50% drew criticism from outside safety researchers as far too lax
The departure of a key figure who led early engineering
Entered the government market six days after the MechaHitler incident. The $200 million is the contract ceiling, not the amount actually spent
An approach that raised RL compute to pretraining levels. All cited scores come from xAI's announcement, and no independent party checking them is named
A leading example of a deployed frontier model generating extremist content at scale, and an early case of the US Congress stepping in directly over an incident involving a specific model
An incident showing that a single line of system prompt can manipulate a frontier model's political output
A merger of a social platform and a frontier lab. Since xAI's valuation in its previous round was $50 billion, it drew controversy as self-dealing
Split out a reasoning mode behind a Think button. The 200,000-GPU cluster in the announcement was mentioned for training the next model; the announcement does not say it was all used to train Grok 3
2024 8
A structure in which chip suppliers came in directly as investors
A strategy of lowering switching costs by adopting compatibility with competitors' APIs
The fastest build-out in the industry, by the company's own announcement. But the initial grid connection was only 8 MW, so it relied on temporary gas turbines, and was stepped up to 150 MW only in November
Image generation started not with an in-house model but through integration with an external model (Black Forest Labs FLUX.1)
The valuation was not disclosed in the announcement
A case of building its own benchmark and releasing it alongside. The announcement said only that it would soon be available to early testers, so whether it was actually released to the general public has not been checked
Expanded the context 16× over the previous version
The largest Apache 2.0 open-weight MoE at the time. But as a raw checkpoint without fine-tuning for dialogue, its practical usability was limited
2023 2
Its first product. Made wit and a rebellious streak explicit design goals, and presented real-time knowledge from the X platform as its differentiator
The starting point of a new frontier lab made up of people from DeepMind, OpenAI and Google. The list of founding members follows Wikipedia; an official xAI announcement has not been checked