Grok Is Gaining on ChatGPT and Gemini. How It Got There Isn’t Pretty.
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 U.S. 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. By comparison, males comprise 49.9% of ChatGPT, 45% of Gemini, and 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, the Post reported.
Adult companionship with AI bots seems to be viewed as an important engagement driver within AI companies. OpenAI is planning to roll Adult Mode in 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 this week. “This will be looked back as a criminal offense in the future,” one bereft 4o user wrote on X.
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.
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, which may go public as soon as early as June, acquired xAI, giving it a chance 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.
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What Else I’m Reading, Etc.
OpenAI fires product policy VP who spoke out against ‘Adult Mode’ [WSJ]
People are sad about losing GPT 4o. Imagine when ChatGPT gets more intimate! [TechCrunch]
The reality and privacy problems with Amazon Ring’s Search Party feature [GeekWire]
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made ICE jokes at a company kickoff event [Business Insider]
Norwegian Olympian wins medal, confesses cheating on his girlfriend in the TV interview [AP]
She doesn’t seem ready to forgive [Guardian]
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