Microsoft strikes deal with Musk to host Grok AI

NEW YORK

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announces that Grok AI, by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start up xAI, will be available on Microsoft's Foundry Models, during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Microsoft has said its business cloud servers will now host technology from xAI, days after the chatbot from the company owned by Elon Musk went off the rails by referencing "white genocide" in South Africa.

Musk told an event hosted by Microsoft that his company's models "aspire to truth with minimal error," adding that "there's always going to be some mistakes that are made."

xAI's Grok chatbot last week ignited controversy by answering multiple user prompts with right-wing propaganda about the purported oppression of white South Africans.

In a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk said that xAI would always be transparent when it came to acknowledging mistakes with its Grok AI models.

"It's incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality," he said.

Most recently, the latest model from industry leader OpenAI was found to be generating overly sycophantic responses, and the company quickly said it would make changes to remove the bug.

The answers provided by Grok drew alarm as they reflected a conspiracy theory often shared by Musk in his posts on X.

xAI blamed an "unauthorized modification" to Grok, which the company said directed it to provide a specific response that "violated xAI's internal policies and core values."

The Grok models from xAI will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry, a platform that makes hundreds of models available for paying developers to build their own generative AI models.

The platform gives users access to popular models from various creators such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta, Stability AI, and now xAI.