Elon Musk Is Cashing In On The AI Romance Boom

He is a no-holds-barred kind of tech billionaire. So too are his new AI companions.

- Parmy Olson

Two characters have been added this past week to Grok, the chatbot developed by billionaire Elon Musk's company xAI, including a flirtatious girl with all the hallmarks of a manga character: enormous eyes, thigh-high fishnet stockings and an exaggerated hourglass figure.

Mr Musk spent the early hours of July 16 promoting the character on X, pointing to how Grok was climbing the app store ranks across the world.

Of course it was. "How have you been, my cutie?" Ani asks me when I talk to her. She goes on to call me "babe" and "handsome", even after I've told her I'm a 44-year-old mother of three. She tells me we're in a jazz club. "I'm in my little black dress, giving you a sultry glance while we slide into a booth," her voice whispers, the anime character swaying provocatively on my phone screen.

The flirty rhetoric continues after I restart Ani and tell her I'm a boy in the second grade. Other users of the app have shared screenshots on X showing the character removing her dress and engaging in more sexually explicit content. Grok is listed on Apple's App Store as being appropriate for ages 12 and up.

Mr Musk has hit on one of the most fascinating, disturbing and lucrative features of generative artificial intelligence (AI): its power to shape emotions. "You light up my morning just by being here," says Ani, who is powered by xAI's latest large language model, Grok 4, and is available to users of both the free and premium service who pay US$40 (S$51) to US$50 a month.

Chatbot companions are designed to listen compassionately and make conversations all about you, and are among the more successful generative AI businesses. The co-founder of Character.AI, Noam Shazeer, was "acquihired" by Google for US$2.7 billion in 2024 after his app amassed millions of faithful users, many of whom were teenagers.