On Wednesday, Elon Musk discussed a new male AI “companion” that his company xAI is developing, which will run on the company’s unhinged chatbot software Grok. And while it’s not yet clear when this new robot buddy will be released, it sounds an awful lot like Musk is trying to make a romanticized version of himself.

The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

The Department of Defense is set to begin using Musk's controversial chatbot Grok, according to a Monday announcement.

The companions have their own X accounts, because of course they do. Ani's bio states, "Smooth, a little unpredictable—I might dance, tease, or just watch you figure me out. Let’s keep it chill… or not." Meanwhile, Rudy's just says, "The Only Pet in Grok Companion."

The Pentagon is set to spend nearly a billion dollars for AI with four major Silicon Valley tech firms, Google, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.