- Grok downloads fell to ~8.3 million in April from a peak of over 20 million in January, and the share of US consumers paying for Grok has been essentially flat year-over-year at 0.17% — versus more than 6% for ChatGPT.
- Enterprise adoption is stagnant: only 7% of companies surveyed by Enterprise Technology Research are using and planning to continue using Grok, versus 48% for Anthropic’s Claude and 40% for Google’s Gemini.
- SpaceX signed a deal in early May giving Anthropic all the computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis — potentially worth a few billion dollars a year — effectively renting Musk’s core AI infrastructure to a competitor.
- Musk himself called xAI “pretty small” and “the smallest of the AI companies” in April court testimony, a striking characterization from someone who once vowed to make Grok the most popular AI in the world.
What Happened?
Elon Musk launched Grok in late 2023 with ambitions to build the world’s most popular AI — one that would be “maximally truth-seeking” and free of what he called the “woke” tendencies of rivals. Two and a half years later, the data tells a different story. Grok downloads peaked in January after an update enabled image manipulation features that drew regulator scrutiny, then collapsed 60%. Consumer payment rates are barely above statistical noise compared to ChatGPT. In enterprises — where the real money in AI is being made right now through coding assistants and productivity tools — Grok is barely registering. Meanwhile, SpaceX struck a deal to give Anthropic, maker of the Claude model Musk once called “misanthropic and evil,” full access to the Colossus 1 data center, Musk’s most powerful AI compute facility.
Why It Matters?
The Colossus deal is the most revealing signal of where Grok stands. When a company rents out its core AI infrastructure to a direct competitor, it is implicitly conceding that the returns from external leasing exceed what it can generate by running its own models. For Musk, who is under pressure to demonstrate revenue ahead of SpaceX’s expected IPO, the deal makes financial sense — potentially a few billion dollars a year. But strategically, it means Anthropic’s Claude models will be trained and served on Musk’s hardware, giving Anthropic a compute advantage while Grok gets nothing from the arrangement except cash. The enterprise data is equally damning: Claude adoption jumped from 21% to 48% of large companies in a single year, while Grok went from 4% to 7%. That gap is widening, not closing.
What’s Next?
Musk’s allies argue it’s too early to count him out. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch noted that developers shift between models quickly, and a strong new Grok release could bring users back. Musk recently reorganized xAI following staff departures, and some observers believe a focused Musk can still close the gap. The more pressing question is strategic identity: with Colossus rented to Anthropic and xAI absorbed into SpaceX, what exactly is Grok’s path to relevance? The consumer AI market is rapidly consolidating around ChatGPT and Claude, and the enterprise market is following. Without a decisive breakthrough in model quality or a killer application, Grok risks becoming a footnote in the AI race its founder claimed he would win.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
