Half of Grok’s traffic comes from adult sites, former employees claim

According to The Information, two ex-xai employees claim that more than half of Grok’s traffic is related to adult content, including pornographic photos, videos, and roleplaying. This is a massive amount of material — based on SpaceX’s IPO documents, users have created 10 billion images and 2 billion videos using Grok during Q1 2026.

1A deliberate bet that rivals have declined

XAI seems to have deliberately pursued this market, aggressively developing Grok’s ability to generate images and videos in ways that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all said they won’t allow. This isn’t so much a failure of policies as a difference in strategy.

Unfortunately, Grok wasn’t born in a vacuum. As The Information reports, xAI waited until it was forced to by regulators to take steps to prevent its users from creating nude photos of real people. In early 2026, X users spent weeks creating these sorts of images in bulk. None of Grok’s initial cofounders remain at the company, and some were pushed out because of their disagreements with the product’s trajectory.

One interesting tidbit from the article: Even Grok’s programming model (the part intended to help humans code) gets regular requests for adult material. Anytime you give someone an AI system with minimal restrictions, some will try to see how far they can push it.

2What the divergence means for the industry

The article also mentions an odd business relationship: xAI leases GPUs to Anthropic. Two very different companies with very different approaches to AI safety and content moderation are financially linked at the level of hardware. This is another reminder of how centralized our computing infrastructure is, and how weird things can get in AI when you look closely enough.