Jun 6, 2026
Elon Musk's xAI spent months distilling Anthropic's Claude to train its own coding models, The Information reports. xAI trained its coding model directly on Claude's outputs. After Anthropic revoked official access in January, xAI engineers kept going through personal accounts and the intermediary service Blackbox AI. Musk previously admitted in court that xAI "partially" used OpenAI models to train Grok, calling it industry standard.
Internally, xAI looks troubled. The pretraining team shrank to under five people. Four Grok code leads left within months, along with many co-founders. One employee accidentally deleted critical training data, costing two to three weeks of work, according to The Information.
Musk's prediction from fall 2025 came true, just probably not the way he pictured it. | Image: via X
All that compute Musk bought up? He's now renting it to Anthropic via SpaceX and to Google instead of training his own models. Supposedly, it's just a stopgap.
