Elon Musk’s AI lab promised employees a 420-dollar payment for handing over their personal tax data to train Grok ahead of the April 15 deadline. Two months on, Bloomberg reports, the money has not been paid.
Elon Musk’s xAI asked its own employees earlier this year to hand over their personal US tax returns as training data for Grok, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing internal chats.
The company promised a $420 payment per submission, the recurring Musk in-joke now embedded in the tax-prep training pipeline of his AI lab. Two months after the data was collected, the payments still have not arrived.
The data-collection ask was timed against the 15 April US tax deadline. By March, Americans were already running tax-prep prompts through Claude and ChatGPT, and xAI was, on Bloomberg’s reading, trying to close the gap with a Grok feature that could handle returns.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now! The internal chats Bloomberg reviewed show the offer was framed to staff as a way to improve the model with real, complex US tax filings, which are otherwise difficult to license at scale and impossible to scrape from the open web.
