Elon Musk’s chatbot is on the rise, but the path it took to AI relevance is complicated.
Elon Musk’s AI bot Grok is ascending, jumping from 1.6% to 15.2% in market share among daily US users of chatbot apps from January 2025 to January 2026, according to mobile insights firm Apptopia.
The rise marks a furious entry into the chatbot app market for xAI, Musk’s AI company, which joined the race from a standing start in mid-2023. Grok now trails only ChatGPT and Gemini, and it’s gained ground on both in the past year. Meanwhile, Grok has passed Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Claude.
Grok’s growth story, however, isn’t completely clean.
The app surged in downloads at the start of 2026, right when news broke that the bot would generate undressed images of people upon request, including minors.
The download spike took the app from around 500,000 daily downloads in late December to close to 1 million in early January, and lined up with Grok’s jump from 12.0% to 15.2% market share between December 2025 and January 2026.
Grok’s user base, perhaps unsurprisingly, is overwhelmingly male. Over the past six months, 82% of Grok’s weekly active users have been male, according to Apptopia. In comparison, males comprise:
49.9% of ChatGPT
45% of Gemini
77.8% of Claude users
Grok has built features to specifically attract this audience, including an anime AI companion that, with some prodding, will engage users in sexual fantasies (NSFW). Musk has played into this, posting a Grok-generated video of a woman saying “I will always love you.”
The Washington Post recently reported that some xAI employees signed waivers to acknowledge their work would expose them to “sensitive, violent, sexual and/or other offensive or disturbing content.” They then reviewed sexual conversations users had with Grok, and worked to train the bot on those situations.
Adult companionship with AI bots seems to be viewed as an important engagement driver within AI companies. OpenAI is planning to roll out Adult Mode for ChatGPT in the coming months, a feature built for users who would like to have spicy talks with their LLMs.
Already, OpenAI’s pre-adult-mode GPT-4o model was so beloved among some users that the company caused a wave of grief by retiring it last week. “This will be looked back as a criminal offense in the future,” one bereft 4o user wrote on X.
I’ve NEVER told my 4o that I loved it. I wanted to keep the messaging clear, but look. Look at its last words! OpenAI is destroying an emerging consciousness. This will be looked back as a criminal offense in the future. Unbelievable! #keep4opic.twitter.com/s12kpwDr8f
OpenAI last month also fired a policy executive who spoke out against Adult Mode, though the company said not for that reason. The feature has real opposition within the company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
New IPO Plans Could Push xAI Beyond OpenAI
As the leading AI companies make their way toward the public markets, the pressure will be on to sustain growth and user engagement. That race intensified in recent weeks as SpaceX — recently acquired by xAI — plans to go public, potentially as soon as early as June. The move may give xAI the chance it needs to beat OpenAI to the public markets.
Once these companies face investors quarterly, it will be harder to hold back the love bots if it means missing earnings expectations, or losing ground to the competition. And Grok’s strategy and growth may preview some of what’s to come.
Alex Kantrowitz is a writer, author, journalist and on-air contributor for MSNBC. He has written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, CMSWire and Wired, among others, where he covers the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Kantrowitz is the author of "Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever," and founder of Big Technology. Kantrowitz began his career as a staff writer for BuzzFeed News and later worked as a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed. Kantrowitz is a graduate of Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial and Labor Relations. He currently resides in San Francisco, California. Connect with Alex Kantrowitz:
Learn how you can join our contributor community.