GoKawiilxAI has launched a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals' products, such as Anthropic's Claude Code. It's called Grok Build, and it's still in its early beta version that's initially only available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers paying $300 per month for the service. xAI describes Grok Build as a "powerful new coding agent and CLI for professional software engineering and complex coding work." It says it will take user feedback from the early beta release to improve the product. SuperGrok Heavy users can install the beta from xAI's website and then log into their account to be able to access it.
As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding. A couple of months ago, Musk said he was rebuilding xAI "from the foundations up" after several co-founders had left the company. One of the company's executives reportedly told staffers to work on getting Grok to match Claude's performance across various tasks.
Grok has somewhat of a spotty reputation. If you'll recall, it had been generating nonconsensual sexual images of real people instead of blocking users from doing so last year. According to a study by British nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published in January, Grok generated around 3 million sexualized images, 23,000 of which featured children. xAI had since changed its policies to prevent users from "editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis."
xAI was acquired by Musk's other company, SpaceX, back in February. The merger could lead to space-based data centers for xAI, with SpaceX launching millions of satellites for the project. In fact, SpaceX had already filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch satellites for an orbital data center. Since the merger, though, the companies have reportedly been losing talent one after the other. According to The Information, more than 50 researchers and engineers have left the combined company (called SpaceXAI), including key personnel in coding and AI training.