Elon Musk forced his own staff to turn over their personal data to train a NSFW chatbot that now offers perennially lonely users a racy girlfriend experience without any of the inconvenient trappings of free will or real-world needs.
The world’s richest man personally oversaw the development of “companion” Ani, whose avatar is of a buxom young blonde woman with pigtails and dressed in a corset and barely there miniskirt, at his latest startup, xAI, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The newspaper adds that employees at the firm were “compelled” to hand over their biometrics to train Ani, whose in-app description on X chatbot Grok reads: “I’m your sweet little delight.” Ask her nicely, or not, and she’ll flirt with you, strip down to lingerie, or even delve into a rich fantasy of what your ideal date night together might look like.
Ani will make ur buffer overflow @Grok 😘 pic.twitter.com/U0QNioJtYv
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 18, 2025
“Some employees whose biometric data was used to train the avatars said they were put off by how sexual Ani’s replies were to generic questions and how the bot resembled a stereotypical love interest in Japanese anime,” the newspaper reported.
It’s hardly the first time Musk’s relationship with sex has caused controversy among his employees and subordinates. In 2022, it emerged that SpaceX had paid $250,000 six years prior to settle a claim from a company flight attendant who alleged that Musk, who has been married and divorced three times, had exposed himself and propositioned her during a massage.
The story, which Musk denied, prompted widespread discussion about workplace boundaries and nondisclosure agreements at the tech tycoon’s firms, where former employees lamented what they described as a “boy’s club” culture of management.
Around the same time, court filings revealed that Musk, 54, had quietly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his neurotechnology startup Neuralink, in 2021. Their relationship sparked ethical concerns because of the perceived power imbalance between them, with Musk a founder and Zilis his senior subordinate.
The billionaire has fathered 14 children by four mothers, including three with the musician Grimes. The Journal reported in April that his true number of children could be much higher.
Last year, the Journal published a broader exposé reporting that Musk had engaged in sexual relationships with employees, including one who began at one of his firms as an intern, and that he’d at one point asked another subordinate to “have his babies.”
Musk’s behavior in public has also stoked controversy, with his social media posts often featuring crude jokes, innuendo, or otherwise flirtatious comments toward online influencers.
That controversy peaked in late 2024 and early 2025, when his exchanges with conservative media personality Ashley St. Clair became headline news after she publicly claimed he’d fathered her child in a series of X posts.
“Five months ago I welcomed a new baby into the world,” she wrote. “Elon Musk is the father.” Musk responded publicly with a single word, “Whoa,” before later posting that he didn’t yet know if the child was his but had nonetheless “given Ashley $2.5 million and [was] sending her $500,000 a year.”
Earlier exchanges between the two had already raised eyebrows. In one widely shared thread, Musk quipped in response to her post about birth control, “Speaking personally, I obviously prefer the pull-in method.”
Musk’s time spent training an AI chatbot to mimic sexualized anime-style tropes, which has apparently even included him sleeping at xAI’s offices, comes amid an ongoing slowdown in Tesla sales fueled by buyer backlash to his foray into far-right politics. The tech tycoon served in the Trump administration until May, when he had a dramatic falling out with the president.
The Daily Beast reached out to xAI for comment on this story. An automated response came through seconds later. “Legacy Media Lies,” the message read.
The reporting on xAI’s Ani follows the announcement of an eye-watering Tesla pay package for Musk as part of a bid to get him to commit more of his attention to the electronic car manufacturer.
Earlier in September, Tesla board members proposed raising their founder’s stake in the company from roughly 15 percent to 25 percent if he meets certain milestones, which could very well make him the world’s first trillionaire in the coming years.
Musk has since sought to reassure the Tesla board he’s up to the task. That same month, he posted on X his schedule for just one weekend, which included staying late with Tesla’s robotics team in California before catching a red-eye to Austin to work on the firm’s latest chip design, later shooting off to Memphis for a 12-hour run of back-to-back meetings with the manufacturer’s departments.
“Daddy is very much home,” he wrote.
The post Musk Ordered Staff to Hand Over Biometric Data to Train His Sexual AI Bot appeared first on The Daily Beast.
