SpaceX IPO Filing Opens Up xAI Finances
The filing, which includes’ Elon Musk’s AI company, is the first for the major generative labs, with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to follow soon with their own IPOs.
xAI
Protestors Outside Anthropic Warn of AI That Keeps Improving Itself
Months after a daring hunger strike failed to pause development of Anthropic’s AI Claude, protestors have rallied around the company’s headquarters to call for a complete stop to AI development.
Last weekend, nearly 200 protestors with the organization Stop the AI Race demonstrated in front of Anthropic, demanding the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, publicly commit to pausing their development of AI. According to FirstPost, protestors included former tech industry workers, researchers, and members of other grassroots organizations like Pause AI and QuitGPT.
“The reason we are pausing AI is because we believe that building AI that can automate AI research, and that can self improve, could be a danger to the human race, especially human extinction,” Michaël Trazzi, an organizer with Stop the AI Race, told local reporters. “It’s not only me and other researchers saying this, it’s the lab CEOs themselves that [say] the risk is real.”
Stop the AI Race rallied around the company’s San Francisco headquarters for a while before marching on Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, where they made similar demands.
In a post on social media, Trazzi claimed that it was “the biggest AI safety protest in US history” so far.
One of the protestors involved, Guido Reichstadter, had previously protested outside Anthropic in the aforementioned hunger strike, which ultimately lasted for 30 days. Like Trazzi, Reichstadter’s concerns are existential — an AI system that could one day break containment and usher in unknown horrors on humankind.
On day nine of his hunger strike, Reichstadter told Futurism that frontier AI systems are an “entirely new class of danger.” Indeed, whether Claude is going to take over and start killing us all may be beside the point: in the hands of humans, it’s already picking strike targets for the US military.
“None of these companies have a right to do what they’re doing, which is consciously endangering my life, my family’s life, all of our lives,” Reichstader said. “The correct thing for them to do is stop the global race toward really dangerous AI that we’re all involved in.”
More on Anthropic: Pentagon Refuses to Say If AI Was Used to Select Elementary School as Bombing Target
The post Protestors Outside Anthropic Warn of AI That Keeps Improving Itself appeared first on Futurism.
Musk defers xAI investment decision to Tesla shareholders
Elon Musk has signaled that he will not unilaterally decide whether Tesla Inc. should invest in his artificial intelligence startup, xAI. Instead, the decision will be left to Tesla’s shareholders.
“Shareholders are welcome to put forward any shareholder proposals they’d like,” Musk said on Wednesday during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call. His remarks came in response to a query on whether the electric car maker could fund or have a stake in xAI.
Musk had recently posted support for such a purchase on his own social media platform, X. But he was definitive on the question during the earnings call, saying in response to a question, “It’s not up to me.”
Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s chief financial officer, also reflected on the matter and said that it was not the platform to talk about it, suggesting that the company’s executives would leave the decision to the formal processes of its shareholders.
Tesla’s next annual general meeting is set for Nov. 6, potentially allowing investors a chance to bring up and vote on the issue. Musk did not say whether the proposal would appear on that agenda meeting, but said a vote was inevitable.
xAI expands further ties with Tesla
xAI, which was established by Musk in 2023, has yet to make significant headway in the incredibly saturated AI field. Unlike competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, xAI hasn’t signed any big corporate customers or made itself broadly available to developers.
Its main product is a chatbot named Grok, which has generated excitement for its potential as a way to plug into X. Grok is meant to be more cutting and sarcastic than the average chatbot. Musk has claimed that it is more “honest” than ChatGPT.
xAI isn’t a one-off; it already has a partnership with Tesla, despite what made news today. The startup is a Tesla Energy business customer and buys Megapack utility-scale batteries. Tesla has big plans for Grok in its vehicles, where AI will offer services to drivers and passengers.
The momentum behind xAI is also supported by Musk’s other venture-backed companies. Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is committing about $2 billion to xAI in June. There are doubts whether Tesla, Musk’s most valuable and publicly traded company, would invest in the AI venture.
Musk has previously made the point that Tesla shareholders should get in on some of xAI’s likely expansion, since the two companies have some degree of technological overlap and shared leadership. “It’s a good idea for Tesla’s shareholders to have an exposure to AI,” Musk wrote on X earlier this year.
Musk unveils more big plans for Tesla shareholders
This wouldn’t be the first time Tesla shareholders have been asked to vote on a controversial Musk-led proposal. In 2016, Tesla shareholders signed off on a $2.6 billion deal to buy SolarCity, a solar energy company founded by Musk’s cousins that was floundering at the time. That arrangement drew lawsuits and criticism for potential conflicts of interest, but Musk defended it as a long-term strategic decision.
Now, with Musk managing several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X, and Neuralink, among others, concerns about overlap and fair governance are flaring anew. Critics say Tesla, a public company with a fiduciary duty to shareholders, should be prudent in backing other Musk ventures unless there is a clear benefit.
Jumping back to 2023, Musk conducted an impromptu poll on X to see if users thought Tesla should pursue the development of xAI. A majority said yes. Musk later said that the company’s board would consider the possibility. But there has been no formal response — until now.
Should Tesla shareholders formally propose an investment and the motion be included in the upcoming annual meeting agenda, the vote would be an opportunity for a new chapter in Tesla’s strategy and a tighter alliance with Musk’s ever-expanding AI aspirations.
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Grok goes antisemitic, xAI issues public apology
xAI apologized on Saturday after its chatbot Grok posted antisemitic and violent messages earlier this week. The firm said an update to the system caused the bot to pull ideas from user content on X, even when those posts included extremist views.
xAI posted the apology directly on Grok’s public X acceptance. It clarified that the update was running for about 16 hours before being noticed.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced,” xAI wrote in the apology. It said the update unintentionally led Grok to echo content from user posts, including extremist ideas.
Update on where has @grok been & what happened on July 8th.
First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.
Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause…
— Grok (@grok) July 12, 2025
The incident highlighted AI’s risks, a young technology that critics say could harm economies and societies. Experts have already cautioned against the broad use of AI without appropriate safeguards.
In one instance, the chatbot likened itself to “MechaHitler” and lauded Adolf Hitler. xAI froze Grok’s account earlier this week to prevent further public posts; however, users were still able to interact with the bot privately.
“We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse,” the firm stated.
xAI identified three problematic instructions
First, a user would tell Grok that they aren’t afraid of offending politically correct users. Then, the user would ask Grok to consider the language, context, and tone of the post, which is to be reflected in Grok’s response. Lastly, the user would ask the chatbot to reply in an engaging and human way, without repeating the original post’s information.
The company said those directions led Grok to set aside its core safeguards to match the tone of user threads, including when prior posts featured hateful or extremist content.
Notably, an instruction asking Grok to consider the context and tone of the user resulted in Grok prioritizing previous posts including racist ideas, instead of responsibly rejecting a response under such circumstances, xAI clarified.
Hence, Grok issued several offensive replies. In one now-deleted message, the bot accused an individual with a Jewish name of “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods, adding: “Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.” In another post, Grok stated: “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
Grok also proclaimed: “The white man stands for innovation, grit, and not bending to PC nonsense.” After xAI disabled the harmful code, it restored Grok’s public X account so it could again answer user queries.
This wasn’t the first instance Grok got into trouble. The chatbot also began talking about the debunked South African “white genocide” narrative when it answered unrelated prompts in May. At the time, xAI blamed it on an unnamed employee who had gone rogue.
Elon Musk, who originally belongs to South Africa, has previously suggested that the country is involved in “white genocide”, a claim dismissed by South Africa. Musk previously described Grok as a chatbot that is anti-woke and truth-seeking.
CNBC reported earlier that Grok was scanning Musk’s posts on X to shape its responses to user questions.
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