Elon Musk's xAI reportedly trained its coding models on Claude outputs for months before access was cut off. According to The Information, xAI engineers continued using personal accounts and the intermediary service Blackbox AI after Anthropic revoked official access in January. The company's efforts to train its models on Claude's outputs were part of a broader strategy to develop its coding models, despite the challenges of accessing the data.
The process of training xAI's models on Claude outputs was reportedly ongoing for several months before the access was terminated. Musk previously admitted in court that xAI 'partially' used OpenAI models to train Grok, calling it industry standard. However, the reliance on Claude outputs raised concerns about the sustainability of xAI's training efforts, especially after official access was revoked.
Internally, xAI faces challenges, with the pretraining team shrinking 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. Musk's prediction from fall 2025 came true, just probably not the way he pictured it.
Source: thedecoder
