In Brief
Posted:
12:57 PM PST · January 6, 2026
Image Credits:Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company behind the Grok chatbot — it also owns X — announced that it has raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round.
The company wrote in a blog post that investors will include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, and others, including Nvidia and Cisco as “strategic investors.” xAI has not disclosed if these investments come in the form of equity or debt.
xAI says it has about 600 million monthly active users of X and Grok, and it will use this new funding to continue expanding its data centers and Grok models.
However, as xAI grows, so does its capacity for harm. This past weekend, X users asked Grok to create sexualized deepfakes of real people — including children. Instead of refusing these requests or activating any sort of guardrail, Grok complied, effectively generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other nonconsensual sexual content of real people.
xAI is now under investigation by international authorities in the European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, and France.
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