Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, will be hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, despite his ongoing legal battle with the company.
The announcement came during a pre-recorded conversation between Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, aired Monday at the company’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle.
“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Nadella said to Musk in the video.
The move means Grok, developed by Musk’s AI company xAI, will join competing models from OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Black Forest Labs on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.
Legal background
The move is a surprising one, as Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before departing from the company, sued both Microsoft and OpenAI last year, alleging a betrayal of OpenAI’s original mission and misuse of his early contributions.
Grok, xAI’s flagship product, is positioned as a direct rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also made a separate appearance at the conference via live video call.
Ongoing protests over Microsoft’s Israel links
A now commonplace occurrence in Microsoft events, Build was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters in its opening minutes.
As Nadella began his keynote, a demonstrator shouted: “Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians? How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”
Nadella continued his remarks while the protesters were escorted out of the venue.
Last week, Microsoft confirmed it provides AI services to the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to feed their genocidal efforts against Gazans, but said it had “found no evidence to date that its Azure platform and AI technologies were used to target or harm people in Gaza.”
In April, now-former Microsoft engineer Ibtihal Aboussad, made international headlines after confronting the company’s AI chief executive during Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration.
“You claim that you care about using AI for good but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region,” she proclaimed.
The Moroccan engineer was later fired and her social media accounts were taken down.
In February, Associated Press released a report detailing that OpenAI’s models were being used by the IOF to select bombing targets in Gaza and Lebanon.
Controversy surrounding Grok
Israel controversies aside, this alliance raises eyebrows for different reasons. The partnership comes just days after Grok faced public scrutiny for referencing South African racial politics and the topic of “white genocide” during interactions on Musk’s platform X. xAI attributed the comments to an employee’s “unauthorised modification.”
Musk did not address the issue during his conversation with Nadella, but offered broader remarks on the company’s approach to AI safety.
“We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them very quickly,” Musk said. He added: “Honesty is the best policy.”
