Grok just earned a huge new agreement with Microsoft despite recent controversies

Despite its recent misinformation controversies, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has landed a new deal with Microsoft.

Just a matter of days after two controversies that first saw Grok make unprompted right-wing claims about a “white genocide” in South Africa, which were then shortly followed by Holocaust scepticism spouted by the artificial intelligence bot, Microsoft has offered to host the tech on its cloud servers.

Grok was created by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and is integrated on the social media platform X/Twitter, which the billionaire also owns.

Now, Microsoft has said its servers will now host the chatbot.

xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini will become available on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry – a “platform for Developers and IT Administrators to design, customize, and manage AI applications and agents”.

Essentially, this means users can access popular AI models from big creators in the industry to help build their own generative AI models.

“Microsoft and xAI are thrilled to unveil the availability of Grok 3 into the Azure AI Foundry Models, marking a significant milestone in AI accessibility and innovation,” Vaidyaraman Sambasivam, the partner Head of product for Azure AI, said in a post.

“This collaboration combines xAI’s cutting-edge models with Azure’s enterprise-ready infrastructure, giving developers access to Grok 3’s advanced capabilities in a secure, scalable environment. Grok models enable a range of enterprise scenarios with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing.”

The news was first announced at Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference on Monday (19 May), where Musk said that his company’s AI models “aspire to truth with minimal error," arguing that “there’s always going to be some mistakes that are made”.

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Musk told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that xAI would continue to acknowledge when mistakes have been made with its Grok AI models.

Musk said: “It’s incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality.”

xAI blamed the recent and concerning “white genocide” claim on an “unauthorized” modification made to the Grok response bot to give results that “violated xAI's internal policies and core values”.

“We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail,” xAI said.

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