xAI is the AI research lab behind the Grok family of conversational AI models, founded in 2023 by Elon Musk together with an initial team of AI researchers. The company built Grok as a chatbot integrated closely with the X (formerly Twitter) platform, positioning it with access to live social and web data as a differentiator against rivals like ChatGPT and Claude.
xAI's corporate status changed substantially in 2026: SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition of xAI in February 2026, and by mid-2026 Musk indicated xAI would no longer operate as a standalone company, with Grok continuing on as SpaceX's AI division. Most of xAI's original co-founders had departed by that point. Grok itself, now on its 4.6 release, continues to be actively developed and marketed as a reasoning-and-agentic AI model.