X.ai
Article
X.ai is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between September 18, 2023 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “if X.ai does anything big”; “Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI)”; “Elon Musk’s safety advisor at X.AI”. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, OpenAI, Anthropic.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: September 18, 2023
- Last seen: October 22, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
- Links For January 2024
- SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
- Links For February 2025
- My Antichrist Lecture
Related Pages
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- Elon Musk (5 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (5 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (3 shared issues)
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- California (3 shared issues)
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- Musk (3 shared issues)
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- Sam Altman (3 shared issues)
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- Andreessen Horowitz (2 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (2 shared issues)
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- Bill Gates (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- Daniel (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Taking near-term extinction risk seriously, even getting to Mars wouldn't necessarily outweigh nudging the AGI field in a more dangerous direction (i.e. if OpenAI has contributed more to capabilities than alignment, or if X.ai does anything big).
Inline links: X.ai
IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative. The other massive things are rounding errors in the face of that, yet get more attention. (The extreme case: Twitter/X is a rounding error *on those other rounding errors*, and ofc that gets discussed 1000x more than everything else.)
Inline links: X.ai
17: Related: Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI) will sometimes say that the OpenAI content policy forbids it from answering a question. Although this originally raised suspicions of code-plagiarism, an x.ai engineer claims that it’s just parroting its training data, which includes this as a common AI response in these sorts of situations.
Inline links: will sometimes say
Center for AI Safety is the one I already knew about. An AI researcher named Dan Hendrycks got really into AI safety and apparently works 70 hour days; I try to follow this space closely and am boggled by the amount of projects he has going at any given time - several lobbying efforts, a bunch of research projects, various showcases of model capabilities, and being Elon Musk's safety advisor at X.AI. Hendrycks has gotten a reputation for being incorruptible (he gave away ~$20 million in AI company equity2 after trolls tried to turn it into a "conflict of interest" and use it to discredit his lobbying) and intense (I don't think it's a coincidence that he gets along with Elon so well). At some point he founded CAIS to keep track of all his efforts, I'm not surprised to see them involved here too, and I imagine they provided some much-needed technical expertise.
Inline links: Center for AI Safety, 2
The big AI companies split among themselves. OpenAI, Meta, and Google opposed the bill, X.AI supported, and Anthropic dithered on an earlier version but ultimately came out in support after their feedback was taken into account. Many opponents claimed that the bill was a Trojan Horse attempt at regulatory capture by the big AI companies, so it was fun watching three of the biggest AI companies come out against it and prove them exactly wrong. I don’t think any opponents ever changed their minds, admitted they’d made a mistake, or even stopped arguing that it was a big AI company plot - but hopefully enough people were paying attention that it discredited them a little for the next fight.
I got some pushback on this claim and agree it’s confusing. Hendrycks divested from his equity in a safety company called Gray Swan; this wasn’t worth anywhere near that amount. But he also says he turned down $20 million in equity in Elon Musk’s x.AI.
Inline links: divested, says he turned down
(also, there was a brief brouhaha when X.AI changed the prompt to tell Grok not to criticize Elon; after some outrage, the offending statement was removed and blamed on “an ex-Open-AI employee” who “hadn’t fully absorbed the culture”. Awkward, but props to X.AI for their unusual decision to have a non-secret prompt, which seems increasingly important for transparency and helped this incident end well).
Inline links: changed the prompt to tell Grok not to criticize Elon
Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Leopard = X.AI, founded by Elon Musk (South African)