Elon Musk's xAI reportedly trained its coding models on Claude outputs for months before getting cut off
Quick Answer
Elon Musk's xAI trained its coding models using outputs from Anthropic's Claude for months, even after access was cut off.
Quick Take
The team has since dwindled to fewer than five members, with Musk's computing resources now being rented out to Anthropic and Google.
Key Points
- xAI used Claude outputs for coding model training despite losing access.
- The pretraining team at xAI has shrunk to under five members.
- Musk's computing resources are now rented to Anthropic and Google.
- Several leads have left the xAI project amid team downsizing.
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~1 min read
Jun 6, 2026
Elon Musk's xAI spent months distilling Anthropic's Claude to train its own coding models, The Information reports. xAI trained its coding model directly on Claude's outputs. After Anthropic revoked official access in January, xAI engineers kept going through personal accounts and the intermediary service Blackbox AI. Musk previously admitted in court that xAI "partially" used OpenAI models to train Grok, calling it industry standard.
Internally, xAI looks troubled. The pretraining team shrank to under five people. Four Grok code leads left within months, along with many co-founders. One employee accidentally deleted critical training data, costing two to three weeks of work, according to The Information.
All that compute Musk bought up? He's now renting it to Anthropic via SpaceX and to Google instead of training his own models. Supposedly, it's just a stopgap.
— Originally published at the-decoder.com
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