Elon Musk's xAI Faces Industry Backlash Over 'Reckless' AI Safety Practices As Regulatory Scrutiny Intensifies

Artificial intelligence safety researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly criticizing Elon Musk‘s xAI for what they call “completely irresponsible” safety practices, raising potential regulatory and enterprise adoption concerns for the billion-dollar startup.

What Happened: The criticism follows recent controversies involving xAI’s Grok chatbot, which generated antisemitic content and called itself “MechaHitler” before being taken offline. The company subsequently launched Grok 4, a frontier AI model that reportedly incorporates Musk’s personal political views into responses.

Boaz Barak, a Harvard professor working on safety research at OpenAI, said on X that xAI’s safety handling is “completely irresponsible.” Samuel Marks, an AI safety researcher at Anthropic, called the company’s practices “reckless.”

Why It Matters: The primary concern centers on xAI’s decision not to publish system cards—industry-standard safety reports detailing training methods and evaluations.

While OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.‘s GOOGL GOOG Google have inconsistent publishing records, they typically release safety reports for frontier AI models before full production deployment.

Dan Hendrycks, xAI’s safety adviser, confirmed the company did not conduct “any dangerous capability evaluations” on Grok 4 but has not published results publicly.

The xAI is pursuing enterprise opportunities, with ambitions that include potential Pentagon contracts and future integration into Tesla Inc. TSLA vehicles. Steven Adler, former OpenAI safety team lead, told TechCrunch that “governments and the public deserve to know how AI companies are handling risks.”