Elon Musk has named xAI's new AI companion "Ani," triggering a new meme coin frenzy around the latest update of Grok, Grok 4.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

Ani, an anime avatar wearing a tight black dress, was launched the same day the tech billionaire was awarded a $200 million Department of Defense contract.

One of the weirder bits of news on the AI-front has been Elon Musk's rollout of sexually-charged animated chat bots. Officially called "companions," and unofficially "waifus," a Japanese term for romantic-partner or wife,

Earlier this week, xAI added what can only be described as an AI anime girlfriend named Ani to its Grok chatbot. Which is how I ended up on a virtual starry beach as an AI waifu avatar tried to give me a “spicy” kiss.

Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.

At a time when other companies — like Musk’s former endeavor, OpenAI — are grappling with accusations that their products are causing users to fall into a state of AI-induced psychosis, Grok appears to be leaning into the technology's ability to quickly build rapport with human users.