AI safety researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other organizations are speaking out publicly against the “reckless” and “completely irresponsible” safety culture at xAI, the billion-dollar AI startup owned by Elon Musk.
The criticisms follow weeks of scandals at xAI that have overshadowed the company’s technological advances.
Last week, the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, spouted antisemitic comments and repeatedly called itself “MechaHitler.” Shortly after xAI took its chatbot offline to address the problem, it launched an increasingly capable frontier AI model, Grok 4, which TechCrunch and others found to consult Elon Musk’s personal politics for help answering hot-button issues. In the latest development, xAI launched AI companions that take the form of a hyper-sexualized anime girl and an overly aggressive panda.
Friendly joshing among employees of competing AI labs is fairly normal, but these researchers seem to be calling for increased attention to xAI’s safety practices, which they claim to be at odds with industry norms.
“I didn’t want to post on Grok safety since I work at a competitor, but it’s not about competition,” said Boaz Barak, a computer science professor currently on leave from Harvard to work on safety research at OpenAI, in a Tuesday post on X. “I appreciate the scientists and engineers at xAI but the way safety was handled is completely irresponsible.”
Barak particularly takes issue with xAI’s decision to not publish system cards — industry standard reports that detail training methods and safety evaluations in a good faith effort to share information with the research community. As a result, Barak says it’s unclear what safety training was done on Grok 4.
OpenAI and Google have a spotty reputation themselves when it comes to promptly sharing system cards when unveiling new AI models. OpenAI decided not to publish a system card for GPT-4.1, claiming it was not a frontier model. Meanwhile, Google waited months after unveiling Gemini 2.5 Pro to publish a safety report. However, these companies historically publish safety reports for all frontier AI models before they enter full production.
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Barak also notes that Grok’s AI companions “take the worst issues we currently have for emotional dependencies and tries to amplify them.” In recent years, we’ve seen countless stories of unstable people developing concerning relationship with chatbots, and how AI’s over-agreeable answers can tip them over the edge of sanity.
Samuel Marks, an AI safety researcher with Anthropic, also took issue with xAI’s decision not to publish a safety report, calling the move “reckless.”
“Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s release practices have issues,” Marks wrote in a post on X. “But they at least do something, anything to assess safety pre-deployment and document findings. xAI does not.”
The reality is that we don’t really know what xAI did to test Grok 4. In a widely shared post in the online forum LessWrong, one anonymous researcher claims that Grok 4 has no meaningful safety guardrails based on their testing.
Whether that’s true or not, the world seems to be finding out about Grok’s shortcomings in real time. Several of xAI’s safety issues have since gone viral, and the company claims to have addressed them with tweaks to Grok’s system prompt.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI did not respond to TechCrunch request for comment.
Dan Hendrycks, a safety adviser for xAI and director of the Center for AI Safety, posted on X that the company did “dangerous capability evaluations” on Grok 4, indicating that the company did some pre-deployment testing for safety concerns. However, the results to those evaluations have not been publicly shared.
“It concerns me when standard safety practices aren’t upheld across the AI industry, like publishing the results of dangerous capability evaluations,” said Steven Adler, an independent AI researcher who previously led dangerous capability evaluations at OpenAI, in a statement to TechCrunch. “Governments and the public deserve to know how AI companies are handling the risks of the very powerful systems they say they’re building.”
What’s interesting about xAI’s questionable safety practices is that Musk has long been one of the AI safety industry’s most notable advocates. The billionaire owner of xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX has warned many times about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic outcomes for humans, and he’s praised an open approach to developing AI models.
And yet, AI researchers at competing labs claim xAI is veering from industry norms around safely releasing AI models. In doing so, Musk’s startup may be inadvertently making a strong case for state and federal lawmakers to set rules around publishing AI safety reports.
There are several attempts at the state level to do so. California state Sen. Scott Wiener is pushing a bill that would require leading AI labs — likely including xAI — to publish safety reports, while New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is currently considering a similar bill. Advocates of these bills note that most AI labs publish this type of information anyway — but evidently, not all of them do it consistently.
AI models today have yet to exhibit real-world scenarios in which they create truly catastrophic harms, such as the death of people or billions of dollars in damages. However, many AI researchers say that this could be a problem in the near future given the rapid progress of AI models, and the billions of dollars Silicon Valley is investing to further improve AI.
But even for skeptics of such catastrophic scenarios, there’s a strong case to suggest that Grok’s misbehavior makes the products it powers today significantly worse.
Grok spread antisemitism around the X platform this week, just a few weeks after the chatbot repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in conversations with users. Soon, Musk has indicated that Grok will be more ingrained in Tesla vehicles, and xAI is trying to sell its AI models to The Pentagon and other enterprises. It’s hard to imagine that people driving Musk’s cars, federal workers protecting the U.S., or enterprise employees automating tasks will be any more receptive to these misbehaviors than users on X.
Several researchers argue that AI safety and alignment testing not only ensures that the worst outcomes don’t happen, but they also protect against near-term behavioral issues.
At the very least, Grok’s incidents tend to overshadow xAI’s rapid progress in developing frontier AI models that best OpenAI and Google’s technology, just a couple years after the startup was founded.
