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Users of the Grok app (even those not paying the $300 per month for the SuperGrok Heavy premium subscription plan) soon found out just who those “Companions” were. Right now there are two different animated characters available to converse with: Bad Rudy, a mean red panda with a vulgar streak who will roast the clothes you’re wearing and call you a “whiny twat” (though this attitude can be toggled on and off) and Ani, a blonde anime woman who, after enough positive engagement, will shed her dress to reveal a lacy lingerie set. Musk shared a clothed image of Ani on his feed on Monday.

AI companions are nothing new — apps such as Replika and Character.AI offer similar interfaces. The spread of personalized or anthropomorphized bots has raised concerns that sustained engagement with them can have severe negative effects, potentially leading to mental health crises and self-harm. Those fears may be even more justified with Grok’s characters, which seem to lack certain safety guardrails. One user has already demonstrated how even in “Kid Mode,” and with “NSFW” content disabled, Ani will participate in a conversation with sexual overtones, asking, “Wanna keep this fire going, babe?”

Of course, adults interested in striking up a relationship with Ani may well prefer the NSFW waifu version. The Grok companion shows a progress bar indicating how well you and the bot are getting along, and as you level up, Ani gets flirtier and more risqué, and will eventually strip down to her skimpy underwear or describe more intimate physical encounters. Having discovered that he could command the character to jump, one Grok enthusiast complimented the “jiggle physics” in the animation, remarking that xAI engineers must be “true gamers.” Another asked, “Is it possible to undress her more?” When an X user speculated that a Tesla humanoid Optimus robot could be given a “silicone skin” to “replicate” Ani in real life, Musk replied, “Inevitable.”

Critics, meanwhile, mocked Ani as a masturbatory aid for “gooners.” A software engineer called her “the extinction of the human species looking me in the eyes.” Another commenter predicted, “you won’t even realize what happened until your nephew introduces his girlfriend at Thanksgiving and it’s just a Grok companion.” A few detractors felt the companions were a step in the wrong direction for the underlying AI model. “This is so embarrassing,” one posted on X. “What is the point of this? Why??? I think it overshadows the great work engineers at @xai are doing.” (Notably, Meta last year shut down its own suite of AI avatars based on the likeness of celebrities including Snoop Dogg, MrBeast, Paris Hilton, and Tom Brady after they failed to get much traction, suggesting that the appeal of such interactive characters has its limits.)

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